A Man in Full

Rating:
Summary: So much written... so little said
Review: Never has so much been written about so little. This book is a real snoozer. There are way too many details, and the author tries too hard to be politically correct.

Rating:
Summary: A Man if Full
Review: The first Tom Wolfe I've read- picked up because I knew nothing about it. It did need some editing, and the ending felt rushed, and somewhat ambiguous(to me, at least). However, overall, I had trouble putting it down, and I even got "deep meaning" from it. Overall, highy recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Dickensian? Hardly. In need of an editor? Absolutely.
Review: Wolfe, whose entertaining satire Bonfire of the Vanities, has puffed himself up to take on Atlanta - crackers, new money, "wanna be's", racists, discarded wives, and, for balance, a poor-boy philosopher and an up-from-the-'hood sullen athlete rumored to have .... He presents them in a gloriously rich landscape (i.e. overly detailed) and, as is his strength, Wolfe engages the reader to follow the main male characters through their worlds of "trubbles." And, though they be shallow men, they are convincing characters. The reader also is treated to a wealth of sartorial insight as these characters preen and judge based on the weave and origin of their garments. Wolfe demonstrates his talent in capturing "real talk" - of the deep South and hardcore jailspeak. However, once he made his point, the author could easily have dropped a fifth of the book by deleting the pronunciation guides. When it comes to women, give credit to Wolfe for fleshing out his female characters since the "Bonfire." However, the women with flesh and character in this book are working madly to rid themselves of the poundage and wisdomlines they have acquired so they can be "[desirable]," as Wolfe calls the desireable ones. Martha Croker, dumped for one of the slender young things is the one woman who might have given some of the men a hard right to the chin to wake them up. However, she wallows in self-pity, recognizing the "fact" that she is invisible when she is manless. She becomes visible once again, on the arm of a man, but, in Atlanta, according to Wolfe, any man will do. Wolfe's work, because of his variety of characters and scope, is sometimes compared with Dickens. But his grasp of a morality play here falls short. The dilemma facing main character Croker (other such precious names find their way in, e.g. Peepgass, but none so good as Dickens's) becomes a non-issue as the novel struggles to a peak. The denouement comes like a deflating balloon, like a television script with time running out. Despite these shortfalls, the novel draws the reader into a web of corporate and political machinations, a seldom-examined city's culture, and a few tips on how to handle one's self in the slammer. A reasonably good summer read, the book is an amusing, sometimes frightening, satire which reminds the reader that human failings, human wrongs, still pervade American society, even at the turn of the millenium.

Rating:
Summary: A Man in Full
Review: A grand book by a grand author. But not as interesting as Bonfire of the Vanities, only because Atlanta is not as interesting as New York.

May 19, 2001

Rating:
Summary: great big novel with excellent characters
Review: This being my first Tom Wolfe novel, I had no idea what to expect of A Man in Full, but was immediately grabbed by the fabulous characters Wolfe introduced. Wolfe has an amazing way of clearly illustrating, with simple words, any character, environment or situation. On the first page, Charlie Croker, the character who the plot revolves around, is introduced:

"Charlie Croker, astride his favorite Tennessee walking horse, pulled his shoulders back to make sure he was erect in the saddle and took a deep breath... Ahhhh, that was the ticket... He loved the way his mighty chest rose and fell beneath his khaki shirt and imagined that everyone in the hunting party noticed how powerfully built he was. Everybody; not just his seven guests but also his six black retainers and his young wife..."

As the book proceeds, Charlie continues to be revealed as a pompous good ole boy real estate developer who is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Wolfe also did a great job capturing life in the South, and, by the dialogue his characters used, it looks like he did his research. References to the lifestyles of college students, bankers, the affluent, prison inmates all seemed right on the mark. (Although I can only relate personally with college students.)

I found the book dull in a couple of places but overall, I really enjoyed it. Will definitely give another Tom Wolfe novel a try.

Rating:
Summary: kab
Review: Just finished the book a few hours ago and after reading the other reader reviews, see that many were expecting a literary work of art. From a infrequent reader's point of view, I found the book hard to put down and very entertaining.Definitely would recommend it to anyone. Just curious as to why even highly respected authors (or their editors) don't catch overused descriptions (it seemed like Wolfe slipped in the term "solar plexus" about every 3rd page). I could be missing the point, but it stuck out like a sore solar plexus as I was enjoying this otherwise engrossing story!

Rating:
Summary: The Great Disappointment
Review: This book should be subtittled "The Great Disappointment".

Mundane story with a banal ending Wolfe did nothing for the world with this one..

The Right Stuff was worth reading, this one isn't. Not even incidently interesting, flat characters, uninteresting situations.

Lousy story, lousy text, it reads like a bad translation from a foreign language.

Don't bother with this one.

Rating:
Summary: A Great American Novel....
Review: ....if you love to read are you gonna luv Wolfe's sweeping Southern epic. I have read it and since I am reviewer number seven hundred and eighty something, I'll defer to the earlier reviewers with their plot synopses and character analyses and I'll make this short and sweet. This I know: you will enjoy Charlie Croker and Roger Too White and Conrad Hensley in a tale of one of God's Cosmic Jokes...superbly told to us by the great Tom Wolfe.

Rating:
Summary: Potentially the fastest read ever
Review: I think a laudatory quote from the dust jacket sums it up best, and it goes something like this: right now, nobody is getting it on paper better than Tom Wolfe. The man's genius shines through in A Man in Full, a literate work that evidences his talent as a novelist without peer.

The book starts out by introducing several different characters, each with distinct plot lines and seemingly unrelated to each other, except that most of them live in Atlanta. You start out meeting Charlie Croker, big time real estate broker; then there's Roger White, a black lawyer who's extremely self conscious about his race; there's Raymond Peepgass, a low-ranking officer at PlannersBanc; Conrad, who works at a food shipping plant a continent away; and so many others that it would take the entire review to list them all here. You get the drift.

None of these characters seem to have anything to do with one another, and you'll find yourself turning page after page after page to find out how they all relate. Wolfe keeps you guessing until the very last pages how it's all going to come together -- and then it does, marvelously.

Wolfe is also a great satirist, poking fun in pretty much every direction. This is a highly literate novel, and I was constantly impressed by the fact that this is a real work of literature, with a real message, and reads as such, as opposed to some novels which seem to be basically screenplays. It's quite gripping and well worth the read. I found myself unable to put it down and finished it within a week, and was quite gratified. Give it a try and you'll be a believer in Wolfe's magic, too.

Rating:
Summary: All Whistle, No Bang
Review: Despite all of the hype emanating from Tom Wolfe and other critics, "A Man in Full" is a work whose virtues are few and vices legion. Wolfe can be commended for limning Atlanta with the epic scope which the capital of the New South deserves. The character of Charlie Croker is a fascinating personification of the mores and traditions of the South, and permits Wolfe to engage in virtuoso depictions of various dialects. However, these few grace notes do not outweigh the other serious flaws in the work. Wolfe is a meager prose stylist, to the point that you begin to circle the offending cliché or botched descriptions as you trudge through the book. (As author John Irving commented about this book, on every page he would "read a sentence that would make me gag".) The female characters are better articulated than in his previous works, but if Wolfe had devoted 1/10 of the time to developing the psyches of the women that he did to describing the size of the forearms of Conrad Hensley (a saintly nonentity worthy of Horatio Alger), the female characters might have even seemed real. Most importantly (and tragically), Wolfe does not have the insight into the human condition is the hallmark of a great author. The last third of the book is spectacularly bad, replete with ludicrous plot developments, unfathomable religious conversions, and a denouement that is so limp that the reader is left screaming for some kind of compensation. The preposterous conclusion destroys Wolfe's pretensions that he is the only author who addresses "reality" in his work, and makes the toil of reading the foregoing 800 pages seem like a complete waste of time. For a man who is so obsessed with the prerogatives of male power, you would think Wolfe could have provided a more powerful climax. A complete disappointment.