Wolfe both social pointillist and cultural partisan

The reader of the new Tom Wolfe anthology, "Hooking Up," comes away with three impressions: That Wolfe is a keen observer and stylist, using his magnetic eye for social details and high-caloric prose to energize his reportage; that he employs those same gifts in his fiction, but frequently uses them to stack the deck against his heroes; and that he is even less fair-minded in his essays, substituting gross simplifications, dubious assertions and highly selective case studies for reasoned argument. The reporter as showman too often becomes the social critic as con man.

BOOK REVIEW
HOOKING UP
By Tom Wolfe.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

293 pages, $25.
"Hooking Up" consists of pieces spanning some three and a half decades in Wolfe's career, from the notorious Herald Tribune pieces on the New Yorker magazine, written back in 1965, through the short story "Ambush at Fort Bragg" (1996), which sends up the TV news business, to a new essay on America on the brink of the millennium.

It should come as no surprise to longtime followers of Wolfe that his writing is animated by an old-fashioned faith in the American Dream. He clearly admires entrepreneurs and engineers who inherited "the moral capital of the 19th century" and embodied an old-fashioned pioneer spirit. "The country," he writes, "turned into what the utopian socialists of the 19th century, the Saint-Simons and Fouriers, had dreamed about: An El Dorado where the average workingman would have the political freedom, the personal freedom, the money, and the free time to fulfill his potential in any way he saw fit."

When it comes to the novel, Wolfe demonstrates an absolutist view, amplifying the call for social realism that he laid out in Harper's magazine in 1989. In his view, only realistic novels based on reporting and a first-hand engagement with the world -- like his own novels "Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man in Full" -- are capable of fulfilling the medium's power. Despite remarkable novels published in recent years by writers like Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, Wolfe contends that "the American novel is dying, not of obsolescence, but of anorexia," that it needs more writers (like himself, presumably) "with huge appetites and mighty, unslaked thirsts for ...America ... as she is right now."

Such assertions leave the reader with the impression that Wolfe belongs to that species he dismissively calls "the Intellectual" -- a species, he claims, purveying "cynicism, irony and contempt" and equipped with indignation and a sneer.