A new collection shows off the man, from tiny mummies to the bonfire of his own vanity.

Wherever Tom Wolfe belongs in the pantheon of American letters, the man does know how to let the air out of a tire. Half vandal and half raconteur, he can deflate an entire city block of egos without getting winded -- managing, in the meantime, to spin out a sparkling diatribe about NASA (Space!) or SoHo (Art!) or the birth of Silicon Valley (the Future!).

And he does it all, of course, in that inimitable Wolfean blend of hype, insight, italics, and ellipses, where the jokes are so funny . . . the intelligence so eviscerating . . . the yarns so intriguing . . . that you forget, just for a minute, that maybe you've heard some of this before.

"Hooking Up" is Wolfe at his cavalier best and worst, roaming between wicked brilliance and self-serving crankishness, heaping insults on vast substrata of American culture (the media, the literati, the liver-spotted Left), then quieting down to tell a great story or two. A loosely organized cluster of essays and one novella, the collection is driven by the same devilish confidence that has been Wolfe's sine qua non for the past four decades. But one of the difficulties of being the architect of a singular style -- what used to fall under the rubric of the New Journalism -- is that you can wind up hostage to its reach. What Wolfe helped to do for nonfiction prose and the dissemination of ideas in modern American journalism can scarcely be overstated. Less clear is whether this particular brand of high-dollar smarts has anything new to say.

The finest work in "Hooking Up" belongs to the same sensibility that produced "The Right Stuff" and "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test": intelligent reportage that produces a story rich with perspective, synthesis, and fact. "Two Young Men Who Went West" particularly bears these marks. Roughly chronicling the rise of Bob Noyce, the Iowa preacher's son who developed the microchip and founded Intel, the story is a marvel of a nerd story made thrilling. It's the Wolfe with a Yale PhD in American Studies, Wolfe telling the scientific, theological, cultural, economic tale of frontier geekdom -- Protestants with slide rules! Who else could turn a young Silicon Valley genius into half Gary Cooper, half "American Gothic"? Who else could make the invention of the integrated circuit dramatic?

Not for nothing does Wolfe name-drop Zola every chance he gets. The French novelist helped changed the face of modern literature when he went into the mines to get the truth for his novel "Germinal"; Wolfe, in both his nonfiction and his fiction, has been equally reality-driven, arguing that what contemporary letters needs is more reporting and less soulful theorizing. The Noyce story contains this thesis beautifully, as does Wolfe's defense of the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson in "Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill." For even more essential than Wolfe's considerable analytic skill is his unstoppable curiosity. This is a man so amused and so perpetually intrigued by what he calls the Human Carnival that he could (and did, in "A Man in Full") turn the science of refrigeration into a riveting tale.

Why then does Wolfe succumb to the snipe-and-carp school of writing in his forays here into literary gossip? (The body count of "Hooking Up" includes the following illustrious names: Susan Sontag, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Renata Adler, William Shawn, John Irving, Lionel Trilling, and E. B. White.) The worst offender is the 30-page essay "My Three Stooges," a counterattack against his critics -- notably Updike, Mailer, and Irving -- after the publication of Wolfe's second novel, "A Man in Full." For those who missed or have forgotten that particular fray, Updike's long, disappointed review in The New Yorker contended that the novel was not literature, but entertainment -- and further, sighed Updike, evoking Henry James's definition of literature, Wolfe's effort had failed to be exquisite. Mailer (in The New York Review of Books) and Irving (on a TV talk show) jumped in as well, complaining of Wolfe's limitations as a writer of fiction.

Well, so what? Writers of far less stature and wealth than Wolfe know how to take such reviews, but Wolfe's rebuttal is an endless recitation of his own sales figures and position on the bestseller lists and glossy magazine covers. The piece pretends to be a continuation of his call for the return of realism in the novel, but it winds up being a long-winded, puerile exercise in solipsism. This self-satisfied persona unfortunately sets the tone for the pieces that end "Hooking Up": a two-part article about The New Yorker written in 1964 for Wolfe's then-employer, the New York Herald Tribune, and reprinted here for the first time. The fact is that Wolfe's New Yorker screed was and is immensely clever and more than a little justified -- imagine Wolfe, at the time a 30-something street reporter, doing a sendup of the legendary Mr. Shawn. (Even the titles are ferocity-in-miniature: "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker," which certainly describes the antecedent brambles of old New Yorker style.) But coming behind the brawling sensibility of "My Three Stooges," even the splendid treachery of these pieces manages to feel slightly more treacherous than splendid.

Which leaves us, really, with what Wolfe seems most intent upon defending: his own contribution to the world of fiction. Originally published in Rolling Stone, "Ambush at Fort Bragg" is a 75-page satirical novella gleaned from research Wolfe did for "A Man in Full"; the story focuses upon a media-sting operation of three good ol' boy soldiers on an Army base in Fayetteville, N.C. The men are probably responsible for the beating and murder of another soldier who was gay, but a case has yet to be proven against them. Sitting in a booth at a topless bar, jawing in redneck patois, they've no idea that a media production team has wired their booth for sound. Along with its reactionary criminal element, "Ambush at Fort Bragg" also caricatures a neurotic New York TV producer, a Southern girl gone media darling who mouths the copy put before her, and a Thai-American exotic dancer -- Lola Thong -- who gleefully sees the sting as her ticket to stardom.

Unsurprisingly, Wolfe has got the outer circumstances just right for sendup lit: the hard-core Southern dialect, the sweaty brows in the stakeout room, the hairdos and cashmere and Social Darwinism of the whole tableau. What he doesn't have are the inner lives -- the imagined, interior being of a racist or a debutante or an immigrant girl that will make us care about who these people are or what they've done. And so what we get instead is perfect portraiture: air-brushed description, hilarious, exclamatory interior monologue, a take-no-prisoners perspective where no empathy exists because none is deserved. This is cold comfort in the realm of literature, where empathy is the necessary atmospheric condition. "Ambush at Fort Bragg" is meticulously realized, about as superficially appealing to the eye as a three-piece white suit -- but it's hardly what you might call . . . exquisite.