Howling Wolfe. - Review - book review

Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.293 pages, $25.

COMMANDING EASY BRAND RECOGNITION in his high-maintenance southern gentleman drag (white suit, patent pumps, and spats) and now pushing seventy, "America's maestro reporter/novelist" is still at it, tracking the zeitgeist in his retro getup. Marrying giddiness with cynicism, Tom Wolfe deploys the mannered showmanship of a circus ringmaster or a Robin Leach--and way too many ellipses ... italics... and exclamation points! A photo of the man in full graces... the back of the book! As he jauntily steps forward (into the twenty-first century, we presume?) his smirk exudes defiant entitlement that brings to mind another man of the people via Yale... Dubya! and is just as gleefully reactionary.

If you think Hooking Up concerns what the pandering jacket copy describes as moral-free young people rubbing "moistened crevices and stiffened giblets together" before learning each other's names--you might as well skip this book and turn the TV back on. Framed as the maestro's take on "an American's world" here and now, these essays address the development of the microchip, the "hottest" new field of neuroscience, "radical changes about to sweep the arts," and Wolfe's tiffs with his colleagues.

With a compulsive hyperbole rivaling the urgency of Richard Simmons, the Wolfe-man's main premise is a whopper: At the turn of this century "America has shown the way in every area save one. In matters intellectual and artistic, she remain[s] an obedient colony of Europe." Wolfe is baffled that though we have won the Cold War, we have yet to liberate US culture from "European formalism" and other "isms." (Did he hear about Pop art?) Blithely separating decadent form from wholesome content, the maestro prophesizes: "The revolution of the twenty-first century, if the arts are to survive, will have a name to which no ism can be easily attached. It will be called 'content.' It will be called life, reality, the pulse of the human beast."

Excellent. When not grousing about highbrow imports, Wolfe is at his best reporting on the human beast from a self-consciously Americanist perspective. "Two Young Men Who Went West" skillfully interweaves portraits of Silicon Valley legend Robert Noyce, a charismatic science whiz and jock (not an effete ... nerdl) who went forth to forge our cyberfest destiny by developing the microchip and eventually Intel, and Josiah Grinnell, the Dissenting Protestant who founded Noyce's hometown in Iowa as a congregationalist haven where g-dliness mingled good works, worldly success, and nonhierarchical institutions. And in his giddy account of trends in neuroscience, "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," he gushes over the latest models of the "self," in which traditional notions of free will and individual responsibility are radically challenged by ... evolutionary psychology! He cheers science dudes discovering the genetic "hardwiring" of character traits ("I love talking to these guys!") and seems to rejoice that the "peculiarly American faith in the power of the individual to transform himself" through "enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slip ping away...slipping away...," thus toppling our native self-help gurus from Emerson to Dale Carnegie to Tony Robbins. He glibly concludes: "Where does that leave 'self-control'? In quotation marks, like many old-fashioned notions--once people believe that this ghost in the machine, 'the self,' does not even exist and brain imaging proves it, once and for all." Yee-ha.

While fawning over neuroscientists who make short work of the "self," he has no such patience with the current cultural relativists, identity politicians, and posthuman types who do so in the academy. In "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists," he characterizes poststructuralist big shots like Stanley Fish (pulling "$230,000 a year plus perks, big-time stuff in academia") and Judith Butler as the latest strain of crypto-Marxist whiners and... "intellectuals"! which Wolfe defines, in the words of a "French diplomat... overheard at a dinner party," as a "person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others."

Like Wolfe's "art worldlings" (the anxious snobs he caricatured in The Painted Word), American intellectuals are country cousins eager to "catch up with ... urbane European models." "The Intellectual," according to Wolfe, resembles Dr. Seuss's Grinch: "That sneer, that high-minded aloofness from the mob, those long immaculate alabaster forefingers with which he pointed down at the rubble of a botched civilization." The only problem is, American intellectuals are eager to "strike the pose" but have "no rubble to point at"! because everything is superterrific here! After all, Wolfe opens the book marveling that the "working class/proletariat" is obsolete now that "the average electrician, airconditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman" enjoys Caribbean vacations, sips designer water with his third wife, and generally lives "a life that would [make] the Sun King blink."