Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe

Before reading this book, I had only been mildly acquainted with Wolfe after reading “O Rotten Gotham,” a selection from his 1968 book The Pump House Gang. There, Wolfe examines human interactions in New York by following around a scientist who is examining rats and their inherent space requirements.

That was a few years ago, but even then I was attracted to this technique of telling a story. In Hooking Up, I find that same sort of cultural examination. The whole book actually turns out to be one big cultural argument, either about the elite Eastern media establishment, neo-Marxist intellectuals, American artists who are unable to break away from European influence, etc. You can tell right off what Wolfe’s biases are, and what his personal opinion is about his subjects.

I think I expected too much out of this book. Because I didn’t do any research or read any reviews, I cracked its pages with a sort of over-optimism, envisioning that the book would be an American odyssey with a central theme, and the first part of this book, “Hooking Up: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium,” led me to believe that the book did indeed have a central theme. I expected this book to encapsulate the new millennium, coming from a man who had lived through, and wrote about, some of the most interesting aspects of it. Wolfe did not deliver.

But the book did alert me to many things about literary journalism. First, literary journalism was born out of magazines, and therefore many books are a collection of essays from these magazines. I was not aware of this, and I felt a bit ripped off.

One thing about the book that I was fascinated with was Wolfe’s portrayal of the disconnect between intellectuals and the vibrancy of America, because intellectuals “had spent the last 80 years being indignant over what a puritanical, repressive, bigoted, capitalist, and fascist nation America was beneath its democratic façade.” In “Two Young Men Who Went West,” I read it as a historical view into Silicon Valley—the human drama of how it started. But Wolfe does not just tell the history, he also puts a moral slant on the tale. His protagonist, Bob Noyce, the young genius engineer from Grinnell, Iowa, became the architect of the tech industry and basically invented the modern corporate model of empowerment, came from a conservative background. Now here’s where it gets interesting. Wolfe stretches the notion that Noyce’s ability to flourish in the revolutionary field of computers was brought about by a purely American Phenomenon: Dissenting Protestantism. This notion ties into Wolfe’s view that the artistic and intellectual hold of Europe has weighed down America: and where America has broken free of this hold, she has thrived:

“Back East, engineering was an unfashionable field. The East looked to Europe in matters of intellectual fashion, and in Europe the aristocratic bias against manual labor lived on. Engineering was looked upon as nothing more than manual labor raised to the level of science…. This piece of European snobbery had never reached Grinnell, Iowa, however…. When Noyce went West, he brought Grinnell with him…Unaccountable sewn into the lining of his coat.”

Wolfe also argues that:

“It was engineers from the supposedly backward and narrow-minded boondocks who had provided not only the genius but also the passion and the daring that won the space race and carried out John F. Kennedy’s exhortation, back in 1961, to put a man on the moon “before this decade is out”…. Time after time, these engineers had to shake off the meddling hands of timid souls back East.”

Wolfe plays on the notion that there is an Eastern establishment that controls the intellectual and artistic will of America. What I got from this book is that he believes that no one has captured the true nature of America through artistic endeavor because there has never been a truly American artistic revolution.

Wolfe concludes that it was the “backward” people—the ones modern artists and intellectuals poke fun at—who provided the passion, the inspiration that brought about some of the most sweeping changes of the century. He notes that

“Noyce happened to grow up in a family in which the light of Dissenting Protestantism still burned brightly. The light!—the light at the apex of every human soul! Ironically, it was that long-forgotten light…from out of the churchy, blue-nosed sticks…that led the world into the twenty-first century, across the electronic grid into space.”

What Wolfe does in this first article is to illuminate his vision, his interpretation of the heart of America. This becomes the backdrop for his frame of the modern American condition—physically wealthy, morally faded, still sucking on the intellectual breast of Europe. He will go on to say that writers, creative writers, fail to capture the true America because they are still looking to Europe for intellectual direction and still practicing Europe’s archaic theories. Because of this, Wolfe asserts, today’s artists confine themselves into their rooms and create art that does little more than tell the world what it looks like when artists sit in their rooms and create art. He says that the new breed of artists will feed on content.

I must say that I burned through this book, and I can definitely understand why Wolfe’s writing style has so much appeal. Some of it got boring, especially sections of his Ambush at Fort Bragg, which got way too windy, and somewhat unrealistic. But Wolfe is one hell of a writer. In the end, what appealed most to me was Wolfe’s conception of the new artists—those whose newfound inspiration is content. I was especially attracted to his image of artists sitting in their rooms and creating useless art.