Collection: Hooking Up

Overview
"Hooking Up" is a 2000 collection of Tom Wolfe's long-form magazine journalism, assembling pieces that probe the cultural shifts and public spectacles of the late 20th century. The essays range across celebrity, media, fashion, technology, and sex, all filtered through Wolfe's keen eye for the social choreography of status and style. Rather than a unified argument, the book functions as a series of vivid field reports that map how America lives and advertises itself at the end of the millennium.
Wolfe treats popular culture and high culture as a single theatrical stage where gestures, costumes, and technological props reveal deeper anxieties and ambitions. The collection tracks the accelerating speed of publicity and image-making, showing how new technologies and new manners remake old hierarchies even as they promise liberation and novelty.

Themes
A central thread is the spectacle of status. Wolfe delights in naming the rituals by which people advertise success: the cars, the clothing, the architecture, the public performances. These outward displays become shorthand for social meaning, and Wolfe reads them with anthropologistlike intensity, uncovering the code beneath the gloss. Celebrity and media production receive particular scrutiny as industries that manufacture attention, turning private eccentricity into mass theater.
Another recurring concern is technology and its social reverberations. Wolfe is fascinated by the machines that extend human will, computers, networks, gadgets, and by how they reshape intimacy, work, and identity. He treats technological change not merely as instrumentation but as cultural performance, a medium through which new types of people and new kinds of gatherings are staged. Sex, manners, and morality are also subjects: shifting sexual habits, evolving language about desire, and the changing rules of personal disclosure are examined as social phenomena that expose larger cultural currents.

Style and Technique
Wolfe writes with a distinctive mixture of baroque exuberance and razor-sharp observation. Sentences can lurch from comic cataloging to precise scene-setting, populated with onomatopoeic flourishes and coined terms that aim to capture the lived drama of a moment. He deploys the methods of "new journalism", close observation, reconstructed dialogue, and immersive detail, to render social types as theatrically as if they were characters on stage.
The tone moves between amused sympathy and merciless satire. Wolfe often skews toward the comic grotesque, delighting in hyperbole while grounding his portraits in meticulous reporting. The result is journalism that reads like theater, where the angle of vision is as important as the facts gathered: his narrator is both spectator and cultural critic, delighting in the scene while insisting on its significance.

Reception and Legacy
"Hooking Up" reaffirmed Wolfe's role as a chronicler of late 20th-century American manners and media. Readers and critics praised his ear for cultural detail and his fearless, idiosyncratic voice; others found his tone sometimes arch or dismissive. The collection continued debates about the ethical and aesthetic boundaries of immersive reportage, as well as questions about satire's relation to empathy.
Regardless of divided opinions, the essays contributed to ongoing conversations about how technology and media reconfigure social life. Wolfe's knack for encapsulating complex social phenomena in memorable phrases and theatrical scenes helped keep him at the center of cultural reportage, and "Hooking Up" stands as a record of a society in flux and a stylistic demonstration of how journalism can dramatize that flux.