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'A Man in Full' by Tom Wolfe

Half ‘Full,’ half empty

Sunday, November 22, 1998

By Bob Hoover, Book Editor, the Post-Gazette

	A Man in Full By Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus & Giroux $28.95

Every so often, a novel is introduced with the hoopla and razzle-dazzle of a new car or fat substitute. That’s the kind of buzz surrounding Tom Wolfe’s “A Man in Full.” Backed by the financial clout of its international owners, Farrar, Straus & Giroux has promoted this novel on a massive scale.

Wolfe’s pale, thin face with its slightly bemused smile has been popping up on magazines and TV in an impressively orchestrated PR campaign that has reached from The New York Times to David Letterman. (Maybe it’s not that far.)

When it published Wolfe’s first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” in 1987, FS&G was a small independent with few resources to promote it. That novel’s success was largely by word of mouth. This time, the publisher is taking no chances.

“A Man in Full” will be a success, too, but it will be hard not to chalk up most of it to the publicity department. After all, “lit’ry” books usually don’t get this kind of attention.

The hype is so cleverly pitched to make us feel that if we don’t buy it, we’re not with it. Wolfe is the chronicler of fads and status, is he not? Without reading his guide to the ins and outs, we’re just one of the many clueless bozos out here in Palookaville.

In spite of the ballyhoo, “A Man in Full” is a remarkable book, written with incredible energy and spirit, a bumpy, twisty pedal-to-the-metal ride. At 67, Wolfe has found the writer’s version of Viagra, a real “Sixty-Minute Man” of the imagination who proudly displays his technique and stamina like a swelled peacock.

Imagine Wolfe at work:

“The stallion breathed in the full overpowering smell of the mare in heat and launched into a ferocious show of machismo. He snorted, he rolled his massive shoulders, he flexed his neck up and down and yawed it back and forth, he did a little dance with his hindquarters and he whinnied.”

Actually that sentence comes from Wolfe’s description of horses mating, one of the more gratuitous examples of bad taste in the book. Taste is the great divider in Wolfe’s world and, for him, one of the great motivators.

Somewhere, he must keep a list of designer names, car models, architects, decorators — the accouterments of the rich. He also must have a sheet of the tacky and the cheap for his less fortunate characters.

At heart, Wolfe is a journalist, not a novelist, and “A Man in Full” reveals him at the peak of his power to observe and report. The plot is marginal to the milieu and the character.

The book, with apologies to Norman Mailer, could be titled “The New Journalist Comes to the New South.”

The city is Atlanta, financial and transportation center of Dixie, a town created by the railroads, burned by Sherman and today a symbol of modern development.

The title character, therefore, is a developer — good ole Charlie Croker, at 60, still loved for his college football exploits, his embodiment of Southern manhood and his stunning trophy wife. What’s more impressive is his half-billion dollar debt, which PlannersBanc wants him to pay back.

Charlie talks funny — “rat innerstin’, “ratcheer,” “evuhbuddy” — Wolfe’s translation of a Southern accent, although no one else in the book talks like that. Charlie’s also massive — huge shoulders and arms, 235 pounds of muscle turning to fat.

Wolfe’s clearly obsessed with big people. His men are either “ripped” or grossly obese. Older women have thick waists and heavy arms; descriptions of young women are usually confined to their breasts, which are always “large.”

Faced with loss and humiliation, Croker is ready to sell out in order to save his lavish way of life — all carefully detailed by Wolfe down to the designer labels. The offer is to support a Georgia Tech football star suspected of raping a young woman. In exchange, the bank will restructure Croker’s debt payments.

Here, Wolfe takes the chance to press the racial nerve. The young man is a surly, foul-mouthed black man from Atlanta’s slums. The woman — with big breasts — is the daughter of one of Atlanta’s most powerful white — and fat — businessmen.

Atlanta’s black political structure, headed by “the chubby” Mayor Wes Jordan, wants this black-white powder keg diffused before his re-election campaign. He arranges the deal through a Morehouse College buddy, Roger “Too” White, the token black partner in one of Atlanta’s major law firms.

Into this mix Wolfe adds Conrad Hensley of Pittsburg, Calif., a decent guy in his early 20s who just wants to make enough money to buy a decent house for his wife and kids.

His life is upended by Croker’s financial problems — he’s laid off at one of Charlie’s companies — and his fairy-tale ruination and redemption provide the slight moral lesson that makes Wolfe’s shaky claim that his reportage is really literature.

The source of Conrad’s salvation is his blind acceptance of the philosophy of Epictetus, a Roman stoic. Wolfe manages to deliver this new disciple of Stoicism from a Northern California jail to Croker’s Buckhead mansion in plot twists that his apologists see as “Dickensian,” but are really transparent attempts to find a way to bring this runaway train of a book to an end.

Finally, religion, but not that old time religion of the Southland, is the salvation for “the man in full” and, if it’s good enough for Charlie Croker, why, it’s good enough for me.

This lightweight conclusion and Wolfe’s reactionary politics — the New South needs more real men like Charlie Croker, most women are unsympathetic gold diggers, everybody sells out — are frequently lost in the dazzle of his remarkable writing and sharp eye.

Individual scenes, such as the Alameda County Jail, hardball negotiations with nasty bankers and a somewhat condescending account of Atlanta’s art culture, are tours de force.

Wolfe overpowers his readers with verbal assaults on all the senses. We must yield to this “master of the universe” when it comes to sheer talent — as a craftsman.

But novels are more than showmanship. Somehow, in the relationships of the characters, in their hearts and souls, we are moved and changed.

This doesn’t happen in “A Man in Full.” It’s a gaudy, frilly, loud machine with emptiness at its core.