mong American writers of the 20th century, perhaps only Tom Wolfe (GRD '57) can be said to have drawn consistently definitive pictures of individuals and society from not one, not two, but three decades. It was Wolfe's reporting that captured San Francisco's '60s counterculture in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and then went on to show the death throes of black nationalism in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. In the '70s, he coined what came to be the quintessential title of the country's baby boomers -- "The Me Generation" -- and wrote about a nation moving in both ambition and direction toward the heavens in The Right Stuff. In the '80s, he walked the streets of New York City -- "where things were happening!" -- for six years and produced his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, one of the decade's best-selling books and perhaps the final statement of its greed and corruption. Now, Wolfe is back with his second novel, A Man in Full, a book that tries to capture the '90s with the same skills that have made the past 30 years essentially his.
What has separated Wolfe from his contemporaries, as well as most of his recent literary predecessors, is his devotion to a detailed realism, which demands painstaking research and complete immersion in the surroundings he chooses to write about. In his 1973 book, The New Journalism, Wolfe advanced a theory of nonfiction as an art form that would eventually come to replace the novel. In a 1989 literary manifesto ("Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast") published in Harper's, he modified and added to this theory, claiming that American fiction must return to the kind of ambitious, realistic, socially relevant "big novels" once produced abroad by Dickens, Zola, and Balzac and in our own country by Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Steinbeck.
Such a diehard commitment to tireless, down-in-the-trenches reporting, as well as direct interaction with those he writes about, has come to be a staple of American journalism, but has kept Wolfe, for the most part, outside of the highbrow literary establishment. As John Updike has written, Wolfe's writing is thought by many to be not literature, but entertainment.
Wolfe is still best known for just how much damned fun his books are to read. Wolfe's style -- his kinetic, excited prose, jammed full of exclamation marks, italicized phrases, onomatopoeic sound bites, and inside jokes at his characters' expense -- has set him apart in an age which increasingly believes that good fiction is abstract fiction. A quick survey of prominent postwar writers -- Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov -- reveals writing that has turned away from strict reporting of the everyday world to increasingly chaotic, fragmented, absurd depictions of life.
Wolfe's first venture into fiction, Bonfire, represents his implicit rejection of this kind of writing. In his own words, Bonfire was an attempt to "cram as much of New York City as possible between two covers." The public eagerly responded, even if the critics claimed the book's half-hearted ending, lack of emotional depth, and solely external characters made it fall one step short of greatness. If Bonfire represented a compression of Gotham, A Man in Full attempts a much larger project: cramming America between two covers.
Wolfe has adjusted every aspect of his storytelling for this increase in scope. Eleven years in the writing, A Man in Full weighs in at well over 700 pages, and includes several hundred characters, four subplots, and sprawling descriptions of both the Georgia countryside and the Northern California urban belt. It also features Wolfe's usual fare of serious reporting sprinkled with liberal doses of humor. Like Charlie Croker, the book's main figure, the chief characteristic of A Man in Full is its massive size.
The book opens during a quail hunt at Croker's 29,000-acre Atlanta plantation, Turpmtime. Croker is the All-American guy whose presence is felt at every point of the book. Sixty years old, a decorated Vietnam vet and former college football star, Croker has raised himself up from the poverty of southern Georgia ("dirt poor and common as pig tracks") to become one of the most important real estate developers in Atlanta. He's dumped his first wife and now carries on his arm an achingly gorgeous 28 year old named Serena, who, at half of Charlie's age, "has Second Wife written all over her." His many praises are sung all over Atlanta, and even his own servants at Turpmtime have written a song in his honor:

Charlie Croker was a man in full.
He had a back like a Jersey bull.
Didn't like okra, didn't like pears.
He liked a gal that had no hairs.
Charlie Croker! Charlie Croker! Charlie Croker!

Still, Charlie is not without his problems: his latest venture, a multimillion dollar complex built during Atlanta's 1996 Olympics, lovingly named Croker Concourse, has become a hideously expensive flop. The banks are calling about the 800 million dollars -- "800 million dollars!" as Wolfe interjects -- he owes in debts, for which Croker can't even begin to pay the interest. As a result, Charlie is $200 million in the red, making a seizure of his many airplanes, cars, houses and horses likely. And his reputation is at stake in Atlanta, where "they liked to talk about family, but money was what it all came down to at the end of the day." To satisfy the consultants at PlannersBanc who keep harassing him for money, Charlie decides to lay off some workers from his food packaging operation and search for other means to pay back his debts.
Meanwhile, two other plots begin to unfold. Roger White II, a successful, educated, black corporate lawyer who can't seem to shake his old Morehouse nickname, Roger Too White, has been asked to work on a case that may upset the city's fragile racial balance. Fareek Fanon, Georgia Tech's All-American running back and 225 pounds of attitude, has been accused of raping Elizabeth Armholster, whose family is "one of the first five names you'd think of if the subject was the White Establishment in Atlanta." Across the country in Oakland, a young laborer named Conrad Hensley has been laid off from one of Croker's frozen food packaging plants. The two subplots begin to merge with Charlie at the center of the story. Eventually, Charlie is presented with a Faustian bargain by Roger Too White, Atlanta's black mayor, and the Georgia Tech board: sell out the Armholster family (old friends he has sworn to help) and have his debts all but forgiven, or maintain his honor and potentially lose everything else.
Throughout the sprawling narrative, Atlanta's invisible but palpable presence is constantly in the background. After 11 years of research, Wolfe has captured the many nuances of the city "too busy to hate" perfectly-right down to the deep cigarette-induced baritones of Atlanta's society women-even if it is a distinctly Northerner's perception. One racial tension after another is explored in A Man in Full: the mistrust of a city 75 percent black, yet still dominated by white business; the ironies of a city government where blacks question who is truer to the race; and even the different perceptions of rich and poor whites, viewing each other as if they were all but different colors themselves.
But unlike most of Wolfe's other books, race is not the theme of this novel. A Man in Full explores the different ways that America, regardless of race, class, or gender, is coming to terms with the confusion of the 1990s and the approaching millenium, of a world changing too fast. As the Wiz, Charlie's Wharton-educated CFO explains, "the paradigm has shifted." Conrad, for one, lives in a plastic suburb described as "one goulash of condominiums," where one community can only be distinguished from another by the reappearance of 7-Elevens and Wendy's franchises. Martha Croker, Charlie's ex-wife, finds herself single again and suddenly out of step with the flow of things. Charlie himself, while listening to a pseudo-postmodern critic discussing Foucault and subjectivity in a piece of homoerotic art, feels

A sudden stab of doubt…Was it he, Charlie, who was out of step? Had his eyes been closed when some irresistible shift took place on the moral terrain? Or were all these people…just plain intimidated, afraid to let it be known that they weren't sophisticated enough to be cosmopolites of the new Atlanta, the international city?

Wolfe has finally developed the talent to look beyond external appearances, and make his characters three-dimensional. The egalitarian sense of suffering that A Man in Full portrays, as each character builds his castle in the sky and watches it crumble, is Wolfe's silent assertion that America's realities, worries and doubts essentially plague everyone, once their immediate differences are swept away.
Still, A Man in Full is not without its own problems. Wolfe hasn't learned how to end a novel. Simply put, Wolfe seems to have run out of time -- at 68, this will probably be his last book. He drops the ending on the reader with none of the build-up and ornamentation of the powerful, informed writing of the first 600 pages.
A Man in Full may not have perfectly captured an entire nation's hopes and doubts, but it comes as close as any attempt seen so far in the 1990s. And who knows what Tom Wolfe has left up his sleeve? The last page of the book offers hope for another commentary in the future: "'Oh, don't worry,' said the man of the world, 'I'll be back.'"