Vol. 2, Number 1	Spring 1999 issue

 

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Almost everything about A Man in Full is enormous: its length, its scope, its financial success, the body of its protagonist, and, not least, its ambition. The fact that it is Tom Wolfe's first book since his 1987 sensation The Bonfire of the Vanities helps explain its long tenure atop the New York Times bestsellers list. Even more striking than this financial success, however, is the strong impression it seems to have made, an impression not completely explainable by Wolfe's prior reputation.

The buzz is not restricted to the author's cult of personality: even some finer points of the book's content, if the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" is any indication, have been the topic of not a few pretentious dinner-party conversations. In fact, people seem to associate the book with its setting at least as much as with its author. When I was in California last December, the information that I was from Atlanta frequently motivated the question, "Oh, are you reading Tom Wolfe's new book?" I was. More often then not, it seemed, so were the people who asked.

The plot of A Man in Full revolves around the financial collapse of high-profile Atlanta businessman Charlie Croker, but other characters-a banker, a lawyer, a warehouse laborer, Croker's ex-wife-have substantial subplots of their own. Some of these characters initially have little enough to do with each other that it takes a great deal of complex maneuvering to reach the startling denouement in which all the plots become one. What all of the subplots share from the beginning, however, is that they're heavy on social commentary, which Wolfe takes very seriously. Because the characters and their situations vary greatly, the scope of the novel's commentary is strikingly ambitious.

Many have called Bonfire of the Vanities the novel of the eighties, and as a result the speculation has been inevitable that A Man in Full will be the novel of the nineties. If that was Wolfe's ambition, Atlanta seems an appropriate setting. Atlanta has boomed this decade, and its growth has epitomized the explosion of the sunbelt. With the 1996 Olympics, the city solidified its status as the unofficial capital of the South and bolstered its dreams of transcending its Southern status to become a truly international city. This dream is the sort of atmospheric characteristic of Atlanta on which Wolfe seizes in A Man in Full. Although some of these characteristics are a bit overdrawn in the novel, Wolfe clearly deserves credit for having done his research: he has both a command of the details of Atlanta and a sense for its general character. For me, reading A Man in Full was eerily like reading a guidebook of my hometown.

Wolfe's accurate description of the geographic details of Atlanta intersects with his comprehensive survey of Atlanta's defining characteristics in his supremely appropriate depiction of Atlanta's suburban sprawl. Particularly revealing is his catalogue of Atlanta's several "edge cities": sprawling collections of retail and office space in the suburbs, convenient to suburbanites who want to have as little as possible to do with downtown Atlanta. The edge city is not a phenomenon unique to Atlanta; nor, for that matter, is out-of-control suburban development. But if there is any characteristic that has defined Atlanta in the nineties, it is the malls and office towers that have sprouted like mushrooms all over the north side of the city.

It is appropriate, then, that Charlie Croker is a high-profile commercial real-estate developer whose critical act of hubris is the financially disastrous attempt to develop an enormous new edge city (named after himself) in the outer suburbs, just a little too far from downtown. In the depths of his financial troubles, he laments the reckless extravagance of his mostly vacant tower, Croker Concourse: "such a riot of egomania!" This lament might as well apply not only to his financial ventures but also to the rest of his life-his expensive cars, his private jets, his mansion, his trophy wife, his huge quail plantation in south Georgia-the entirety of which seems to have been devoted to the dream of becoming "a man in full."

Wolfe uses Croker's financial collapse as a vehicle for a telling critique of the idea of manhood, a trait that Croker embodies in a variety of traditional ways: he's a former football star, a good old boy from the rural South, and-until the failure of Croker Concourse-a monumentally successful businessman. Virtually all of the characters whose points of view the narrator adopts at some point in the novel are male (Croker's first wife Martha is the only exception), and their wildly divergent brands of manhood provide an interesting context for Croker's fall. One character in particular, a former warehouse laborer who becomes a devotee of the ancient Greek Stoic Epictetus while in prison, serves as a very interesting foil for Croker; the novel's last hundred-or-so pages tell a truly bizarre but captivating story of the two characters' unlikely meeting and the effect of Epictetus' philosophy on Croker's concept of manhood.

Unfortunately, Wolfe is not content to give merely an interesting critique of manhood. While such a critique could certainly be done well enough to be called one of the best novels of the nineties, it seems unlikely that it would be ever be called the definitive novel of the nineties. To his own disservice, Wolfe seems to have aimed for the latter. As a result, A Man in Full is full of peripheral themes that, even in 742 pages, Wolfe doesn't have room to develop. Although the novel contains some clichés about manhood (the "real man" and his inner "red dog," for example), the idea is well enough developed that they are forgivable. This is not the case for the clichés about gay rights, economic inequality, divorce, Southern accents, and corporate downsizing, to name only a few. Even race, one of the central issues of the novel, is handled not with insight and nuance, but with stereotypes: there's a black college-football star accused of the date rape of a rich white debutante; a well-dressed, light-skinned black lawyer nicknamed Roger Too White; and a charismatic black preacher whose congregation shouts things like "tell it, Reverend!"

Wolfe's style is almost as plagued by excess as his social commentary and literary ambition. Much of the book is monotonously snide without being satisfyingly satirical. The gratuitous use of ellipses makes many passages painfully melodramatic. He overuses certain words, most notably "loins," the instances of which I started counting when they first became annoying and stopped counting when they became much too numerous. Unfortunately the novel takes itself seriously enough that these repetitions are not funny, only irritating. But by far the novel's greatest fault is that it tries to cover too much; not content to write a good novel, Wolfe gets mired in Croker-like hubris, in the ambition to say it all.