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 The Pleasure of Tom Wolfe's
Company
"Only Tom Wolfe," observed my son Zack - perhaps Wolfe's greatest fan, "can get away with having just his name in large print and not the title of his new book on the book's cover." The title, "Hooking Up" does appear in smaller print on the book's spine. Wolfe's latest addition to the annals of American literature is a collection of New Journalism essays (plus a novella) that captures the ethos of America on the eve of the new millennium and the new century. His stylized and witty language and his uncanny ability to zero-in on social changes and to articulate the reasons for them have a magnetic quality that turns the readers into Wolfe captives. He sets forth the major characteristics of our new ethos in the very first chapter, What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American's World and then adds detail and historical perspective in the chapters that follow. In this first chapter Wolfe writes as if casting a backward glance to the year 2000 from some distant future date. Nothing measures changes in attitudes, mentality and life styles better than changes in the use of language. "By the year 2000," Wolfe writes, "the term 'working class' had fallen into disuse in the United States, and 'proletariat' was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears." It is the working class however, "the average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman" that sets the tone of today's ethic and ethos. The working class and the brainy new rich of Silicon Valley. Wolfe notes that the quality of life enjoyed by the American working class echoes the theories and predictions of Saint-Simon, the nineteenth century French utopian socialist. Wolfe seems to imply that with the spread of political and financial freedom and a high standard of living to the ubiquitous working/middle class, there is an inevitable loss of the finer, aesthetic things in life. In a hilarious passage he describes how by the year 2000 the children of the New York super-rich have come to emulate the fashion of the "homeys" - black youths of New York's slums" and the word "perversion" had become obsolete. "Sadomasochism had achieved not merely respectability but high chic", writes Wolfe and I think how unfortunate that "Quills", a film celebrating the perversions of the Marquis de Sade, was released after the publication of "Hooking Up". In a riveting essay, Two Young Men Who Went West, Wolfe explains how the Midwestern Dissenting Protestant ethics of Grinnell, Iowa of all places, came to form the ethic foundation of Silicon Valley - the new corporate structure, the casual dress, the lack of ostentation and pretence. This commonness and crudeness dominating the beginning of the second millennium permeate every aspect of life, including American art and literature. The Invisible Artist is a poignant essay about Frederick Hart, one of America's greatest realistic sculptors of the last quarter of the twentieth century who never received any recognition from what Wolfe calls caustically, the "art worldlings". These art worldlings who shape opinions about American art have dispensed with skill in favor of imagination long ago. "Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art," Wolf quotes from Tom Stoppard's play, "Artist Descending a Staircase". Skill and popularity are an anathema to the art worldlings. To them "popularity meant shallowness and rejection by the public meant depth." Wolfe is at his best biting back the venerable literary establishment of three - Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving who cut to shreds his latest novel, "A Man in Full". In the essay, My Three Stooges he makes minced meat out of the three writers who have not produced in a long time works of critical and popular acclaim comparable to the acclaim "A Man in Full" received. Wolfe suggests that irrelevance, instead of jealousy is what may be at the root of these writers' vitriolic denouncement of an immensely successful novel. It has been long since Mailer, Updike and Irving have produced works relevant to the readers' lives. Tom Wolfe's critical look at The New Yorker and its descent into commonness is his coup d'eclat bringing "Hooking Up" full circle to its introductory essay. Reading "Hooking Up" is like having anew a favorite rare wine of long ago. It brings to mind memorable passages from Wolfe's books of long ago and is a pleasure to be savored.
Ophelia Georgiev Roop
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