A Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Proud American
by our literary editor, St. Clair Carr
Reviewed in this article: Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux/Picador).As faithful readers of NEW IMPROVED HEAD will know, this is a serious literary site. Among other things, that means that we do not rush to review the latest and most hyped publications. We prefer to review the types of book booklovers read – books you find in the used book store or on remainder tables.
So this week we are reviewing Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe. This book, a collection of magazine articles and a novella, was published in 2000. The cover of the trade paper edition describes it as a bestseller, although being a bestseller hasn't kept the trade paper edition, published in 2001, from ending up on the remainder table for $5.99 Cdn.
I haven't been able to find any information about just how well Hooking Up sold, but it deserves to be a bestseller. Mr. Wolfe – a writer with whom our literary staff often disagree – is one of the few mainstream writers left still thinking when he writes (usually, anyway – one still wonders what was on his mind while he was writing The Right Stuff), and one of the things he has written while thinking is Hooking Up.
What he was thinking about while he wrote Hooking Up was the current appropriateness of the analyses of contemporary society he has made over the last forty years. It is the book he would have written if he had ever heard of NEW IMPROVED HEAD and cared enough about its opinion of his work to try to rebut our review of one of his early works. In that review we accused him of writing about marginal social developments of the 1960s and ignoring the crucial ones. Hooking Up proceeds on the assumption that Mr. Wolfe has been writing about crucial developments all along.
While the book may at first appear to be a grab bag (one of the pieces is a forty-year-old article about New Yorker, another is a novella, another a business biography, and so on), the articles in it have a common theme, the replacement of the upper-class standards which ruled society through the 1960s by more demotic or democratic ones.
For example, the business biography explains how Robert Noyce, inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel, revolutionized business by replacing the old feudal model of business organization with a model derived from principles of the Congregational church in which he grew up. Another piece, "The Great Relearning," observes that many of our current social problems are the result of large-scale rejection of well-founded principles which had been generally accepted till the 1960s. The title piece (the first in the book) notes in its second paragraph the rejection by the populace of upper-class fashions.
The thirty-seven-year-old article (reprinted for the first time in this collection) is both an example of Mr. Wolfe's own rejection of establishment standards and an argument that the New Yorker has been profitable because it started catering to suburban middle-class standards. And then there's "My Three Stooges," an account of John Irving's, Norman Mailer's, and John Updike's attacks on him and on his novel, A Man in Full.
Mr. Wolfe has been rebuked for writing this piece, which many consider self-promoting and self-justifying. However, it is an excellent illustration of the principles Mr. Wolfe discusses in the rest of the book. He depicts Mr. Irving, Mr. Mailer, and Mr. Updike as defenders of an aristocratic conception of literature, and himself as a practitioner of a democratic one. Could be true – quotations are supplied. Whether true or not, the points made are well worth considering.
As would be expected, the quality of the articles varies (even the quality of my articles varies, eh?). His two articles about sociobiology, though worthwhile on the whole, were marred by a failure to grasp some of the issues involved (for example, predicting a person's score on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale from his electroencephalogram is neither free from cultural bias nor evidence that intelligence is genetically determined). "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists" is mainly crude propaganda (Mr. Wolfe even descends to the contention that the Nazis were socialists because they called themselves socialists). There's no accounting for tastes in fiction, and many people admire the novella included here, "Ambush at Fort Bragg." However, applying standards similar to Mr. Wolfe's own, I found it wanting. If it was intended as satire, it is limp. If it was intended as an examination of the human condition, it is banal. If it is intended as an expose, it is unpersuasive because fictitious. Your opinion may differ.
On the whole, though, even the lesser articles – even "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists" – offer analyses which are often perceptive and, when not, still worth examining. The good articles are good, especially since Mr. Wolfe has reined in the characteristic stylistic excesses which reached their peak in The Right Stuff. I particularly liked "The Invisible Artist," a biography of the sculptor Frederick Hart embellished with withering criticism of the art establishment. Mr. Hart was a remarkable person (besides being an important sculptor he also, after teaching himself chemistry, invented an acrylic resin which can be used to make clear, see-through statues and which is also used for non-artistic purposes) and the criticisms of the art establishment hit home.
As you have probably gathered, Mr. Wolfe regards all the standard-toppling he writes about as a mixed blessing. However, another common theme emerges from this collection – Mr. Wolfe is proud of the United States for being a "powerful, prosperous, and popular" society in which elite standards can be toppled. "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists" is an enthusiastic rebuking of the more misguided of America's domestic critics, and it probably ended up as propaganda because Mr. Wolfe's enthusiasm temporarily disarmed his critical faculties.
Anyway, Mr. Wolfe is proud to be a citizen of a country in which the people set standards and in which issues like one's responsibility for one's actions are seriously investigated. And he is proud of its standard of living ("By the year 2000...the average [American] electrician, air-conditioning mechanic or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink" – that's from the first paragraph of the first article).
Well, he may have a point. Debate and a willingness to evaluate the value of tradition are important democratic values. On the other hand, perhaps he is wrong in assuming that America is more iconoclastic than other countries, or that having tons of money is a good thing. In fact, he seems to have some serious doubts about that last point himself.
But you can assess the validity of Mr. Wolfe's ideas for yourself. I think that's the idea. You'll probably enjoy assessing them.
A Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Proud American © John FitzGerald, 2003
Click the banner or click here for ACTUAL ANALYSIS
More reviews | Home