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Summary: Scottie Pippen Writes Books?
Review: After reading many of the reviews contained herein, I wished I'd read them before I started this 700 page endeavor. Although I enjoyed many of the characters, I was completely appalled by the ending. It reminded me of the time our Chicago Bull hometown hero told the Coach he wouldn't go back in the game down by one with 1.8 seconds left. Like Pippen, Wolfe must have realized Full Court shots rarely go in, and after spending 600 pages developing characters, he decided to take his paycheck and go home, rather than seeing his writing thru to the end. I am a frequent reader, and found this to be the worst ending of a story ever imagineable. I'll never read another book by Wolfe again. I felt violated as I closed the book the final time. Unless you have too much time on your hands, I would recommend leaving A Man In Full on the shelf and making another selection.
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Summary: Truncated ending ruins novel
Review: I enjoyed many parts of this book. At times the writing seems to be done for the sheer interest of seeing it on paper. Many times I found myself wonder, "Why is the author telling me this?" I found myself skimming and I don't usually like to skim.And then after 9/10 of the novel it suddenly comes to one of the most hokey endings I ever remember. It certainly does not do the author justice having read the preceeding writing.I wonder what happened to the author? Did he come down ill? I want to like this novel and recommend it to friends because there are parts of it I really enjoyed and got into, but the other parts I am embarassed for and can only recommend it with some caveats.
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Summary: Barrel-Chested Man Leaves Broad-Shouldered Woman.....
Review: Barrel-Chested Man Leaves Broad-Shouldered Wife for Narrow-Hipped Boy with Breasts: I find most fiction tedious or pretentious, so I'm always glad when another Tom Wolfe book comes out. There are few fiction writers today who can match Wolfe's vitality, the muscularity of his prose, or the warp and weft of his subplots. The three main plot lines of A Man in Full involve Charlie Croker, an Atlanta real estate tycoon whose empire is on the verge of crumbling; the alleged rape of a white college student by a surly black college basketball star; and the descent into prison of a worker named Conrad in one of Charlie's warehouses. The most compelling characterization is the barrel-chested Croker, a grizzled, gimpy former star running back. Croker isn't just a man in full, he's larger than life: crusty, crude and impatient, self-important but not haughty, rascist and homophobic in a genial, teddy bearish way. Croker has replaced his sturdy wife Martha with a luscious 20-something trophy wife with long, smooth legs, silken hair, and plenty of Victoria's Secret negligees in the walk-in closets. Despite this arm candy, a plantation the size of Rhode Island, and enough uniformed black servants to staff General Motors, Charlie isn't happy. Trouble is a-brewing: Charlie's last development project, a huge office park, is only partly leased, and unless he can start paying off his bank loans, the weasels are going to repossess him down to the salt and pepper shakers on his Learjet. Croker may be larger than life, but he's always believable. Conrad, on the other hand, tests our credibility mightily. He's poor, working class, uneducated but highly intelligent, virtuous, saves at least 4-5 lives in the course of the book, is freed from prison by a serendipitous earthquake, saves elderly pensioners from greasy mobsters, and is finally united with Charlie Croker, who should be his nemesis, in order to nurse him back to health. Basically, he's a guardian angel. He belongs in a Victor Hugo novel...he's suspiciously like Jean Valjean! One subplot that Wolfe neglected, unfortunately, is the alleged rape. Who doesn't love reading about a pretty white coed, a badass black hoopster, and the love that dares not speak its name? I kept waiting for this story, which simmered quietly beneath the others, to burst forth like a lanced boil, to shock, electrify, and titillate us. Instead, it petered toward an odd and unsatisfying resolution, oddly enough involving Charlie Croker. It could have been used to great advantage, like the hit-and-run scene in Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe is at his most engaging when describing obnoxiously wealthy and powerful people doing fatuous and petty things in their natural habitats. In one of my favorite scenes, several high-rolling, powerbroking men are seated around a table at a crowded charity function. Their talk is so self-absorbed that the women in their group can't get in a word edgewise, and end up flattened back against their chairs, rendered invisible and inaudible.
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Summary: Oh dear me
Review: Peppered with Wolfe's bizarre and laughable descriptions of burly male physique, A MAN IN FULL is a slow moving story filled with stock characters. Thank God that the universally panned BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, the movie, will prevent this from ever hitting the big screen.
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Summary: Wordsmith Yields to Publisher
Review: Tom Wolfe is the master wordsmith of his generation. The entertainment of seeing his craft unrolling before me was enough to compensate for his lack of understanding of the South and the people who have lived there for the past 250 years. However, it seemed to this reader that when he got to the number of words his publisher wanted, he just chopped the story off. Then he added an epilogue--I suspect at his publishers urging--which was a little insulting. Every one of the characters lived happily ever after regardless of how tortured their lives had been in the previous 700 pages.
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Summary: Wolfe does it again!
Review: Mr. Wolfe has done it again,creating the Southern version of Bonfire Of The Vanities! Wolfe is truely one of the great American novelists.
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Summary: A Good Read...Until the End
Review: Tom Wolfe's novel was brilliant for the first 97% of the story. The characters are vividly protrayed, and the images of modern Atlanta Wolfe paints are perfect for an end-of-the-century novel such as this. Throughout the book is an alternately funny and damning portrayal of male impotence due to age, lack of courage, or circumstance, a topic which is rarely discussed openly in American life but lies just under the surface, covered up by all sorts of distractions, illusions of grandeur, and advertising. My only problem with this book, and it's a big problem, is the ending. It seems as if after the climactic scene, Wolfe loses interest in writing any more, so he wraps everything up in a brief epilogue that is completely out of character with hte rest of the novel. After he juggles over 20 characters for 700+ pages, we learn the fates of most of the them over the span of about four pages. The effect is similar to eating an 8 course gourmet meal then being sent home with a cup cake for desert. Nonetheless, I am glad I read this novel. It is a fine work, and should stand the test of time as one of the landmark novels of the late twentieth century.
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Summary: The message here
Review: Reviews seem to miss the point of this book, which is, in the aggregate, the male characters in this work and their core characteristics represent "A Man in Full." Name the male attribute and it is here: competitiveness, honor, dishonor, preening self-importance, flawed heroism, tragedy and fall from grace, the desire to be remembered, dominance, aggression, the search for philosophical truth, moral courage, self-doubt, fear of aging, feebleness and death, the resilience of youth, physical strength and weakness, stature and the fear of losing it, social and business gamesmanship and one-upsmanship, leadership, cowardice, guilt, political machination, arrogance, war-like-behavior, chest-beating machismo, ego, testosterone-driven desire, redemption, even luck ... all of it is here. This work is more a sprawling, often self-indulgent exercise in exploration of what makes a man, specifically the American male, than it is a novel with a focused plot, orderly character development and exposition. Hence the oddly unsatisfying, abbreviated ending, as if Mr. Wolfe ran out of avenues of maleness to explore and simply ended it.
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Summary: Enjoyable Read Except for the Ending
Review: I really enjoyed reading 7/8 of this book. I was interested in the characters, and all of the stories were compelling, although Mr. Wolfe's editor should have been more strict with him. (That symphony scene was painful to read!). All in all, though, the end was really a letdown! I couldn't believe I had just forged through 700+ pages, only to have all of the stories summed up in a short discussion by two of the characters. Wolfe totally dropped the ball on some of the plot lines. We never learn what happens to Serena, Harry Zale, Herb Richman, Conrad's family, Peepgass's paternity suit, Croker's son, Wallace, Elizabeth Armholster, etc. I was totally disappointed by these oversights as a result of the rushed ending. What happened? Was there a deadline that had to be met? Did Wolfe break his arm? Inquiring minds want to know....
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Summary: A Man in Full
Review: This is a complex truer-than-real-life story, the quintessential book for the Decade of the American Empire. Wolfe asks how a Man, the titanic figure Charlie Croker, can deal with forces that are bigger than he is, forces generated in the end by hopelessly greedy, vain, tawdry, small-minded souls who make up our social fabric and have set the juggernaut of the '90's in motion. At first blush, real-estate and conglomerate magnate Croker is an unsympathetic character, preening himself and struting around like a rooster, a despicable holdover from the "decade of greed." But mirrored against his melieu in Atlanta, he becomes a "fuller," more sympathetic character than any other in the book and Crocker's trumpeting and bellowing distracts the reader's attention from Wolfe's devastating satire that tramples all of our pretensions into dust. As a society, Wolfe tells us, we have not ascended from the social depths portrayed in Bonfire of the Vanities, but rather we have conspired to sink even lower. As Wolfe paints him, Croker is both a dreamer and a doer, constantly in action, moving and planning and executing, giving everyone else's tawdry life a meaning that they themselves are unable to give it. Charlie Croker is no stuffed shirt. He made his way to the top from the backwoods of Georgia, through hard physical labor that left him well-muscled and vision. On his hunting plantation, he proves himself an adept rider and shooter. By contrast, the bankers who despise him because they loaned him more than the investments would return were small minded men who haven't a clue without the Crokers of the world what to do with the billions with which they had been entrusted by depositers. Croker is a man who built, the man who built for our dreams and our future. If he fell somewhat short, he achieved more than anyone else. Here is a man who, in his own day, was the star of the Georgia Tech football team, but whose skills are no match for the current day hero Fannen "the Cannon." Yet, when we compare Croker to the Cannon, there is no question which is the numbered shirt and which is the real man. In order to answer the problem he raises in the book, Wolfe turns to a previous time when the logic of empire was too overwhelming for any man to comprehend or control, the latter days of the Roman empire, and his answer is that of the Stoics which he explores and explains at some length, though in doses small enough that the philosophical pill is not too hard or bitter to swallow. And, true to stoicism, when the weight of the world is too much for even Croker to bear, he shrugs and drops it on top of the bewildered Lilliputians who try to bring him down. Leaving them to fight over the scraps, he wanders off to create a new world of his own. There are some true to life gems in the subplots. For instance the Oakland police supported car-towing scam that lands the other hero of the novel in Santa Rita (prison) is true life documentary that could and should be on 60 Minutes (for shame, Mayor Jerry Brown). It is, however, in the ending of the novel that the shortcoming of the book appears. With a well structured plot, and with characters drawn in the masterful Wolfish manner, somehow the ending comes suddenly and unsatisfyingly. The message of the book is not lost but it suffers to the extent that the aesthetic power of the book suffers, This is a minor disappointment when contrasted to the books real strengths, however, which tower above the genre.
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