The rise of the so-called New Journalists in the early ‘60s injected reportage with an element of sensationalism previously relegated to the realm of fiction. This sensationalism could more accurately be dubbed magnification—or, as Tom Wolfe might put it, Magnification! New Journalists like Wolfe and Truman Capote didn’t just find stories; they made stories, investing them with amplified literary bite that some considered irresponsible but few would call unexciting. Wolfe proved particularly adept at capturing the tone of the time, from speech rhythms to the fallacies of passing fashions. When he belatedly tackled his first novel, The Bonfire Of The Vanities, the results were plausibly epochal and encapsulating. Through sheer force of popularity, the book forever branded the ‘80s as a decade of greed and class warfare, illuminating the invisible battle between the Masters Of The Universe and the rest of the world. What Wolfe accomplished was the opposite of New Journalism: As a novelist, he took fiction and lent it the excitement of reportage and the venom of veracity. But his long-awaited follow-up, A Man In Full, failed to fulfill his mandate; it read more like a weak retread of Bonfire than a definitive portrait of fin de siècle America. Now comes Hooking Up, Wolfe’s first collection of (mostly) non-fiction in more than 20 years, an odds-and-ends compendium of short pieces that starts out well before falling apart. The earliest pieces are linked thematically, mostly hinging on the rise of the technological age and humanity’s place within it. “Two Young Men Who Went West” tells of the birth of the microprocessor and the origins of Silicon Valley’s culture of casual billionaires, while “Digibabble, Fairy Dust, And The Human Anthill” and “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died” tackle neuroscience, as epitomized by such brilliant but controversial philosopher/ researchers as Edward O. Wilson. Wolfe’s prose remains hyperactive and somewhat cranky, but he does hint at a sea change coming at the end of a long continuum, where computers and the science of never-before-realized exactitude vie regularly with the ingenious but flawed human brain. Wolfe name-checks Nietzsche, touts Sinclair Lewis, and toys with Marxism, but his essays remain rooted in the world of the everyday, even if his writing reads as too lofty for practical application. But Hooking Up’s latter half proves useless. First, there’s Wolfe’s occasionally entertaining but self-serving tirade against critics of A Man In Full (specifically arch-nemeses John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving), ultimately a vain embarrassment no matter what the impetus. Then there’s the previously serialized Ambush At Fort Bragg, itself an outtake from A Man In Full. Finally, we get a once-controversial, now-quaint take on The New Yorker’s years under the watchful eye of William Shawn, as if anyone cares at this point outside of the participants themselves. Once so in tune with the present, Wolfe (even in journalist mode) suddenly seems out of touch in Hooking’s later chapters, a disappointment following such promising material. The world is changing, all right, but in ways Wolfe doesn’t appear to grasp. He’s so intent on prolonging past battles and tracking cultural progress that’s he’s become as pedantic and invisible as the academics and intelligentsia he loves to deride.