A Man in Full

Rating:
Summary: shaggy behemoth of a novel
Review: I'm sure that by now everyone is aware of the basic story of A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe's eleven-years-in-the-making, heart-surgery and-depression-interrupted, follow up to his great novel of the 80's, Bonfire of the Vanities. Charlie Croker is a 60 year old, good old boy, developer in Atlanta. A former star Georgia Tech halfback, his empire includes a game ranch, a frozen foods business and a white elephant of an office building that is bleeding him dry. Judging his success purely by the accouterments, he appears to be doing okay, with a hottie trophy wife, a Gulf Stream 5, palatial houses, etc. But his bankers smell blood in the water, one of them (Raymond Peepgass) has even secretly put together a syndicate to take over the office building at cut rate, and Charlie has to lay off some workers at the food business, including young Conrad Hensley, just to free up cash and buy some time. Meanwhile, Georgia Tech's new star halfback, Fareek Fanon, is being accused of raping the daughter of one of Charlie's wealthy society cronies. Up and coming black attorney Roger White II (Roger Too White) has been called in to handle the defense and he offers Charlie a deal: speak out in support of Fareek at a press conference orchestrated by the mayor, and they'll get the bank to back off. As Charlie wrestles with this decision, Conrad works his way across the country, converting to Stoicism in the process. Their paths all meet when Conrad is assigned to Charlie as a physical therapist after knee surgery and shares the tenets of Stoicism with him. With the press conference looming Charlie must decide whether to go along with Roger's plan, by praising Fareek, and save his empire and position in society or be true to himself, at the risk of losing everything and possibly causing race riots in Atlanta, and tell the truth, that Fareek, like many athletes, is shallow, self-centered, pampered and arrogant.

Of course, interspersed with this basic narrative, Wolfe provides the myriad details, learned expositions, social observations and zeitgeist probings for which he is justly famous. These elements of the novel, if not quite up to the level of his best work (Radical Chic, Bauhaus to Our House, The Right Stuff and Bonfire), are still very funny, extremely insightful and wildly ambitious. He really just blows the doors off of most other novelists, simply by being willing to attempt such a massive portrait of America.

If you just take that set up, it looks like this is merely an updating of Bonfire--rich guy's world collapsing, racial tension, etc.. But the real risk taking, the nearly masochistic reach that Wolfe makes here, is in his portrayal of Conrad Hensley. For over thirty years, Wolfe has been a master of the social satire. He has basically made a career out of pricking the gonfalon bubbles of America's most ostentatious and self-important cultural elites. But once in a great while one of his subjects has managed to pierce the ironic veil and make him stumble. The two who spring to mind most readily are the race car driver Junior Johnson (read his profile "The Last American Hero") and Chuck Yeager (read Orrin's review of The Right Stuff). Both of these men penetrated Wolfe's ironic detachment and he ended up portraying them as genuine unalloyed American heroes. Now it's perfectly understandable that this point was lost in his pretty substantial corpus of work, but with Conrad it becomes clear what was going on all along; they are all Men in Full.

When Conrad is in prison and has just discovered the teachings of Epictetus and the other Stoics, he finds himself in a situation that clearly portends his own rape and asks:

What would Epictetus have done with this bunch? What could he have done? How could you apply his lessons two thousand years later, in this grimy gray pod, this pigsty full of beasts who grunted about motherf***in' this and motherf***in' that and turning boys into B-cats and jookin' punks? And yet...were they really any worse than Nero and his Imperial Guard? Epictetus spoke to him--from half a world and two thousand years away! The answer was somewhere in these pages! What little bit Conrad had learned about philosophy at Mount Diablo had seemed to concern people who were free and whose main problem was to choose from among life's infinite possibilities. Only Epictetus began with the assumption that life is hard, brutal, punishing, narrow, and confining, a deadly business, and that fairness and unfairness are beside the point. Only Epictetus, so far as Conrad knew, was a philosopher who had been stripped of everything, imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, threatened with death. And only Epictetus had looked his tormenters in the eye and said, "You do what you have to do, and I will do what I have to do, which is live and die like a man." And he had prevailed.

There in a nutshell is what Wolfe has been looking for throughout his decades long journey through the American landscape--modern successors to Epictetus, men who live and die like men, who simply do the right thing. He had found two such men in Yeager and Johnson and now, for the first time, he has created a fictional character in their image. And Conrad becomes the vehicle through which Wolfe demonstrates that there is still a tiny flame of genuine decency burning within modern man.

This is the point at which the book becomes truly remarkable. Because Tom Wolfe--68, ill, depressed, snide, old Tom Wolfe--allows Charlie Croker to redeem himself. What a symbol of hope the author holds out to us. Charlie Croker who has been as caught up in the games and role playing of our vacuous modern world as any of the characters, real or fictional, that Wolfe has ever described, finds it within himself to become a man in full, to do the right thing, to live like a man. It turns out that Wolfe is a romantic at heart. His long career attacking pretense is suddenly cast in a different light. It turns out he's been trying to get us to strip away our materialist, politically correct, corporatist, conformist, opportunistic outer selves and become Stoics. Many of the critics refer to this book as Wolfe's most humane work and it is to this realization that they are unknowingly referring. After thirty some odd years of poking fun at people, we find out that he's trying to save their souls.

Of course, all of this is an invitation to ridicule. It's bad enough if you are merely a brilliant conservative. Worse still to be one of the great journalists of all time, and a conservative. Much worse to be a great novelist, and a conservative. But now, here comes the worst blow of all; you just can't be a brilliant journalist/novelist who's a compassionate conservative; you overload the circuits. But at the end of the day that is what we are left with. Radical Chic and Right Stuff established him as a first rate journalist. Bonfire and Man in Full elevate him to the first rank of novelists. If his politics weren't galling enough before, here he is juxtaposing an AID's benefit with a prison rape and calling on us to return to a moral philosophy that predates (and influenced) Christ. And here, in the twilight of his career, it becomes obvious that the Conrad Hensleys and the human possibilities of a Charlie Croker are central to his vision of man. No wonder the reviews are so wildly contradictory and even self-contradictory. The left wing establishment does not even seem to understand what Wolfe has set out to do, but what they do understand, they clearly don't like.

Take a look at what the critics take issue with in his work. Wolfe's critics dislike his politics. Well of course they do, his moral politics are fundamentally two millenia old and profoundly conservative. They say his female characters are weak. Of course they are; he's uninterested in women. All of his work turns out to be an attempt to understand modern men. They say he only presents characters' surface personae, not their inner beings. That's his point; we've abandoned our inner beings, our natural selves, and we live the lives we project to people. The essence of the Wolfe critique--from Radical Chic, to the Apollo program, to modern art--is that modern man is hollow. Like C.S. Lewis' "men without chests", they lack a moral core and so every passing fade or fancy is manifested in their outer beings. Lacking any internal compass for moral guidance, they follow the herd like lemmings. Are gay rights popular? Fine, I'm pro gay! Indian rights are big? I feel Native American pain! Those paint splatter things that my two year old could do are worth $5 million? Jackson Pollack is a genius! You tell me what attitude is at 50% in the polls and that's how I feel. Throughout his career, Wolfe has been throwing these forms of political correctness back in the faces of the literatti and the glitteratti. So, yes, each of these criticisms is absolutely accurate. In fact, they are the point of his writing. The critics just happen to have, typically, missed the point. And so, instead of giving A

Rating:
Summary: If you like Tom Wolfe do NOT read this book!
Review: Just as I was priding myself on heroically crawling through 745 of the 785 pages of this wreck, just as I realized that all the pain and frustration from reading so large and so bad a book for so long was about to end, I got to the part where Charlie Croker's young wife explains to him what "hooking up" is. I nearly gave up and threw it in the trash. It was like some teenager explaining what "rap music" is to his younger brother. Or how to use the word "dude", or talk "cool", or something.

Unfortunately, Tom Wolfe seems to have slid from a wry, emotional observer of "society" into a self-delusional fop who's just realized that people exist. What IS this crazy new thing the kids are doing called "hooking up"? Y'know, I hear some girls even ask the GUYS! Crazy, isn't it?! But apparently the existence of college students having sex with one another has eluded Mr. Wolfe throughout his white-suited life.

In one chapter he actually explains what "gotcha back" means. Gotcha back! Apparently it's some "street" term for "I'm looking out for you". Who knew? And then there are all these cute phrases he repeatedly uses in an attempt to coin trends he thinks are new or just around the corner. Things like: "Palm Beach helmet" haircuts, hallways painted "Computer Case beige", "bean" being a slang word for taxicab, "Country Metal" music, and neckties that resemble exploding pizzas.

And on top of all this painful prose the most engaging theme of the whole book is supposed to be Stoicism. No doubt it's definitely a powerful and meaningful philosophy, but not necessarily a very interesting or complex one. Alright, yeah, we're supposed to be tougher, more honest, and above all that's against us. Well, no kidding.

"A Man in Full"? A waste of time.

Rating:
Summary: A Character Story With Uninteresting Characters
Review: Let me first say, that even when Wolfe misses, as he does here, he command of language and imagery at least keep the book from being boring.

Plot is almost non-existent here. This is merely a showcase for characters, and unfortunately, only two of them are interesting (Conrad and Peepgrass). Croker, the main character, gives a glimpse of deep south money, but he proves to be repetitious and simple. The Mayor and Roger-Too-White characters are completely without depth and do not ring true.

It does have some delightful segments of course, (the 'workout session' and Conrad's prison stay) which redeem the book somewhat. Otherwise, I would only recommend this to die-hard Tom Wolfe fans.

Rating:
Summary: A Southern novel with all the elements!
Review: This novel had all the elements that go into a good southern read. Wealth, power, race, dishonesty, the whole bit. Charlie Croker had it all. Sixty years old, he had a young trophy wife, thriving business deals, a mansion in Atlanta's Buckhead community and a plantation and horse breeding farm. Then the bottom begins to fall out. In the Bay Area, 23 year-old Conrad Hensley had a wife and two kids to support. He worked hard in one of Croker's food plant and then was promptly laid off. A series of misfortunes has him coming face to face with Charlie and changing both of their lives with the help of the Stoics. Meanwhile the politics of race and economics is played out when the star football player for Georgia Tech is accused of rape by the daughter of a prominent white businessman. Atlanta, with a black mayor and blacks in key postions pride themselves on the democractic way they handle race relations. Is this incident going to tear Atlanta apart?Roger Too White is proud of his aristocratic background and his status not only in the black community but also his postion in a prestigious white law firm. All of these components come together to make this a most compelling read that has bits of humor, irony, and tragedy.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling passages; unsatisfying plot
Review: I read this book shortly after I moved to Atlanta and was struck by the accuracy of Wolfe's portayal of this city. Wolfe's Atlanta characters are mainly wealthy white businessmen and black politicans, although some immigrants have cameos. I found the author's caricature of Atlanta's social and political life to be accurate. The most compelling scenes, however, were the ones set in a California prison, where one of the characters spends a few weeks. Overall, the book has an unsatisfying plot, but Wolfe's writing can often immerse you in the settings of the novel.

Rating:
Summary: Too many words
Review: The man who wrote such perfect magical-realist journalistic writing in concise and compact form is now producing novels that are bloated in every sense. Big fat doorstops full of overblown writing and sloppy construction. Pity he got so famous no one at the publishing company will act the tough guy and edit him properly. Big fat smug book written by a compact smug man.

Rating:
Summary: What happened to Wolfe's comic talent?
Review: Not by far as funny as 'Bonfire of the Vanities'. It is a reasonably entertaining story though, that you keep reading to find out what will happen, but not because of the writing itself. The book is also worth reading because of its illustrations of interesting things like the goings on in investment banking and how a bank attempts to retrieve a large loan from a company. And the life of a business tycoon, and prison life, and the world of illegal aliens. These illustrations would all be based on journalistic research and not on the imagination of the writer. What is rather fanciful is the enthousiasm of the young labourer for the writings of the Stoics, and the business tycoon transforming his life because of his teaching from it. But what I missed above all was the comedy that you expect having read his previous novel.

Rating:
Summary: Rather wait for the unavoidable screenplay....
Review: The fact that Bonfire of the Vanities was used as a filmscript has obviously influenced Mr. Wolfe's writing. Sure his settings and dialogies are sometimes brilliant and alive again, but the book reeds too much like a filmscenario. Even the work of the cameraman is already spelled out by many very visualisable despcriptions of a.o. Conrad's arriving at his worksite at dawn with the setting red sun illuminating the dust thrown up by a skidding arriving car.

Even more, some caracters seem in advance to be fitted to certain actors - who else can play Roger too White than Denzel Washington, too name just the most obvious.

To make matters worse, the most intriguing part of the book could very well have been inspired (to put it nicely) on the film "the Bad Boys" in which a very young Sean Penn's prison career is very similar to that of Conrad. Although Penn doesn't apply Zeus' inspirtation, he too challenges the existing power structure within the prison community. But this was in 1983.

My advise: read Bonfire first and leave it to that.

Rating:
Summary: A Book in Full needs a beginning, a middle and an ending too
Review: For almost 700 pages this book was a joy to read - not despite but because of the overdrawn characters and rollicking plotline. Wolfe creates a dozen (mostly) memorable characters, warmly posing them like a shameless family photographer amidst a richly textured southern landscape. The whole exercise sits squarely on the fine line between caricature and stereotype, and while neither the story nor the characters feel "real" the result is an effortless, engaging read.

The effect is an almost mythic tale that actually hinges upon the near mythic account of certain long-dead philosophers. The plot, the dialogue and the characters are clearly designed to serve one another in equal measure, building a story that's true in the way that all myths are true - because of what it means to illustrate. It's meant to be over the top, and Wolfe smiles and winks with every joyous excess.

That's why the sudden collapse of the story line at the end of the book seem entirely unfair and deeply disappointing. With 700 pages of preparation and at least four major plotlines all converging at last, I expected a bombastic finish worthy of the buildup. What I got instead was 25 or so hurried pages that tied up every loose end in the least satisfying way imaginable; a contrived dialogue where one character explains everything that went unwritten. Deux Ex Machina may be a classic mythic device but it's never felt so cheap as it does here; even bad detective stories routinely do a better job at this.

Imagine a Beethoven symphony building for almost an hour to a quick finale composed of a breezy ragtime tune; the sudden change in atmosphere that came at the very end of this book was that jarring. One can almost imagine that the author himself was disappointed to end it this way, his love for the characters having been so evident for so long.

I truly felt cheated, and can only imagine that an editorial decision or publishing deadline caused the sudden and traumatic amputation of such a florid story line. The last chapter, "Epilogue", could easily have sustained 100 more lushly written pages of exploration as these characters finally reached full flower. Is it too much to hope for the re-released "Director's Cut?"

Rating:
Summary: Great novel even if John Updike says not
Review: Alanta, Georgia stars in Tom Wolfe's latest novel, A Man in Full. This book, already nominated for a National Book Award, follows Mr. Wolfe's other blockbuster novels Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff.

The main character in Tom Wolfe's novel is Charlie Croker, a 250 pound former Georgia Tech football player turned real estate developer. Charlie is a provincial Donald Trump. At Georgia Tech, Charlie was called the 60 Minute Man because he played both offense and defense for the full 60 minute game.

Atlanta is like no other city in the South since it lacks much historical lore. It is not old and decorated with stately 200-yeard old mansions like Charleston, Savannah, or Richmond. Anything antique in Atlanta was long ago razed to make way for a myriad of gleaming glass office towers.

While the harmony between white businessmen and black citizens is good, in Atlanta blacks and whites live apart like they do in most American cities. But unlike most cities, in Atlanta blacks thoroughly control local politics, because 75% of the voting population is black. They proudly refer to their home as the Chocolate Mecca. Consequently all the political power is vested squarely in their hands.

At the pinnacle of black society are the Spellman and Morehouse college elite such as the attorney Roger White, another major character in the novel. At school, Roger White earned the nickname "Roger Too White" from his college classmates. This refers to his flawless dress, interest in classical music, and impeccable English free of black colloquialisms.

Through Roger Too White, we learn several heretofore well-kept secrets of black society. Roger White is also a member of another privileged circle. These are black people who can pass the so-called "paper bag test". These are black people whose skin color is no darker than a brown paper bag.

The main character Charlie Croker is a down-home country fellow who has made a pile of money in the real estate business. He spends it lavishly on toys like a Gulfstream V jet and a 28,000 acre quail-hunting plantation. The stewardess of his jet is a shapely honey named Peaches. Only in Georgia-the self-proclaimed Peach State--would you find a mouth-watering bimbo sporting that name.

Charlie Croker dumped his wife of many years to marry a 20-something trophy wife. Together they live in the most fashionable of Atlanta neighborhoods: Buckhead. In Buckhead the grass is greener and the air is cooler than in the southern and eastern sections of the town where the blacks live. As a matter of fact, it is cooler and greener than Chamblee-now called "Chambodia" because of all the Asians-and the lilly white suburbs that surround the city too.

In describing Turmptime, Charlie's quail hunting preserve, Wolfe is accurate in his description of a Southern plantation. The Southern Plantation culture still thrives albeit as a recluse for the wealthy sportsman. But Tom Wolfe picked the wrong sport in my opinion. It is true that some hunters prefer quail. But the truly rich folk buy southern plantations so that they can hunt ducks.

Each of the recent Tom Wolfe novels have added new phrases to the English language. The title to The Right Stuff has come to mean someone who has the wherewithal to conquer the toughest of assignments such as space flight. The major character in Bonfire of the Vanities is a "Master of the Universe". This is someone, like the protagonist millionaire bond trader, who is an absolute master of his own destiny and holds the world at bay. No such phrase jumps out at you when you read A Man in Full unless you consider the phrase "commuterburbs". These are the suburbs that ring all major American cities-Wolfe singles out Snellville, Georgia. These are featureless towns where the bourgeois classes live and make the daily, grueling commute to the big city to work.

The other major character in A Man in Full is Fareek Fannon, Georgia Tech's star running back. He comes from the the squalor of a ghetto in southern Atlanta. Fareek faces a predicament that lets Wolfe further explore the delicate subject of race relations in Atlanta. Fareek is accused by a Georgia Tech coed of rape during the annual week of partying by black college students known as Freaknik.

Freaknik is a week-long party in Atlanta where black college students from across the country gather to engage in the same sort of debauchery that white colleges students pursue in Fort Lauderdale during Spring Break. But while the occasions are similar, Wolfe points out that the in-your-face attitude of the black students makes the white Atlantans quite uncomfortable.

Some white business leaders have sought to rein in the Freaknik festvitity. Of course, the blacks have said such crowd control strategies are rooted in racism. Wolfe illustrates this point perfectly when he describes a bare-midriffed black beauty wildly gyrated her body atop a car in stopped-dead traffic on Peachtree street. Her dance takes place in front of the staid all-white, Old South Piedmont Driving Club. The black woman dances while the rap lyrics "Ram-Yo-Booty" blare from the car's speaker. Regardless of how open-minded and liberal you purport to be, the pleasure gained from the lyrics "Ram-Yo-Booty" is not understood by anyone in the white community. Quite the contrary, this music suggests a militancy that threatens the same people.

The novel's plot unwinds as that attorney Roger Too White and the Atlanta Mayor, Wesley Jordan, conspire with Charlie Croker to create a deal that will save Fareek Fanon, the football start, from the rape accusation and save the city from a resultant race riot. The black civic leaders and the white business interests want to keep race relations in Atlanta humming along in The Atlanta Way.