A Man In Full – Tom Wolfe, 1998 ★★½

Half a Man Is Better than None

Tom Wolfe is a deft print pictorialist, crafting word pictures that crawl inside your skull and stay there –however forgettable the subjects of his prose may be.

Reading A Man In Full, his second novel, is to discover how even great writing, produced with vim and energy and a decade’s worth of research, can hit a wall when concerns of plot and character are ignored.

Yet you can’t help but enjoy the ride, however slow it becomes around the middle or how suddenly it stops at the end.

Four different characters inhabit the title role at various points in this novel of multiple perspectives set mostly around Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta is the capital of the New South, styling itself as post-racial melting pot when it is anything but. Charlie Croker is a good-ole-boy business tycoon and a former Georgia football legend living way beyond his means with a hot young wife and big old debt: “A mountain of it! But real estate developers like him learn to live with debt, didn’t they…It was a normal condition of your existence, wasn’t it…You just naturally grew gills for breathing it, didn’t you…”

Roger White is an attorney who finds a chance to make something of himself by endearing himself to the city’s “Chocolate Mecca” power structure, even if Roger “Too White” doesn’t quite fit in with the newfangled “African American” sensibilities of his “brothers.” White’s asked by the mayor to get Croker’s help defusing a racially-charged controversy swirling around inner-city Atlanta legend Fareek “the Cannon” Fanon, a star college running back who is said to have raped the daughter of a rich executive.

White is skeptical he can get Croker to play ball: “He strikes me as a…Cracker through and through.”

“So much the better,” said the Mayor, “if we can get him to come around. You know, he was a big star for Georgia Tech, too, just like Fareek, a running back. They called him ‘the Sixty-Minute Man,’ because he played both offense and defense. Maybe we’ll find out he has a profound…empathy…for athletes under the dreadful pressures of stardom.” Not to mention a crushing debt problem the city might be able to help alleviate.

There’s Harvey Peepgass, low-level executive at Atlanta’s PlannersBanc, helping his employer shake Croker down over his $500 million debt. Peepgass has been a good little bean counter for years, but an affair with a Finnish gold-digger forces him to reconsider the meek life, and awaken a “red dog” he discovers inside himself. Can he salvage his own life by tearing down Croker’s?

Finally, there’s Conrad Hensley, not in Atlanta at all but working at one of Croker’s warehouses near Oakland, California when his life gets turned upside down by Croker’s cost-cutting. Abandoned by his family, and left in jail, he discovers a Stoic philosophy that begins to turn his life around – in time for a fresh start that takes him to – where else? – Atlanta.

"Atlanta favors people who are hypomanic...so manic they refuse to pay attention to the odds against them, but not so manic that they're irrational." Mayor Wes Jordan's summary of his city in A Man In Full forms a kind of backdrop for the falls and rises of the characters presented in the novel. Image from https://atlantafi.com/best-things-to-do-in-atlanta-at-night/

At the heart of A Man In Full is an exploration of a certain type of manliness, practiced especially by Croker and emulated by the others. Croker’s way of dealing with being 60 is to pick up a large, deadly snake found on his sprawling property, Turpmtine, and carry it to captivity himself. Sexually impotent, Croker has other ways of proving his virility, Wolfe writes:

“Croker was almost bald, but his baldness was the kind that proclaims masculinity to burn – as if there was so much testosterone surging up through his hide it had popped the hair right off the top of his head.”

Whether you enjoy Croker’s company as much as you are meant to dictates how much pleasure you derive from A Man In Full. Croker’s woes dominate the novel, in ways both tragic and comical, like when pondering he might have to sell off his prize Gulfstream jet:

“From now on he’d have to be like the Vietcong and travel on the ground and live off the land…”

There’s also Charlie’s second wife, Serena, who makes a point of being photographed modelling her new motherhood for a local magazine. Serena’s a looker with an understanding of how having a baby with Charlie makes for a kind of insurance policy.

Charlie himself knows the score: “Your first wife married you for better or for worse. Your second wife, particularly if you were sixty and she was a twenty-eight-year-old number like Serena – why kid yourself? – she married you for better.”

A Man In Full doesn’t build from chapter to chapter. Rather, it develops a set of particular themes and/or settings for chapters that remain largely static in terms of action. These almost work more as semi-fictional essays, not unlike Wolfe’s celebrated forays into New Journalism early in his career which bounced across streams of consciousness to draw out some form of social commentary at the heart of the story.

There’s plenty of social commentary in A Man In Full, everything from the 1990s predilection for a certain kind of necktie Roger White dubs the “Pizza Grenade” tie, for the way it resembles an explosion of pepperoni and olives; to Conrad’s noticing the growing prevalence of a certain convenience store in the cultural tapestry: “The new landmarks were not office towers or monuments or city halls or libraries or museums but 7-Eleven stores. In giving directions, people would say, ‘You take the service road down past the 7-Eleven, and then….’”

Much of this is funny and on point, but not all. Wolfe’s attempt to delve into black culture comes off awkward. If any rap song ever used the term “shanks akimbo,” I might take this criticism back, but I don’t think I will. Racial concerns are meant to power this novel, the way they did Wolfe’s best-known novel from the 1980s, Bonfire Of The Vanities, but whereas that book had memorable black characters trying to set off a conflict, this one presents duller ones trying to prevent one.

The female characters are even worse, with only Croker’s first wife Martha registering, and only from finding herself socially invisible since her divorce. “Whatever happened to the first Mrs. Ronald Reagan – and she was once a movie star!” Martha says of her First Wives Club membership. “They’re all invisible. They’re superfluous.”

I did enjoy the brief glimpse we get of Peepgass’s Finnish conquest, now suing him for child support and comically overbaked in a way that makes for nasty fun. Wolfe enjoys writing about sex, mostly from the carnage aspect when it goes wrong, and it works here. But when Peepgass and Martha wind up with each other, so she won’t be lonely and he can live in comfort, it’s one of this novel’s weakest buttons. Why does a woman as smart as Martha settle for such a transparent operator?  

The limpest part of A Man In Full by far is Conrad the warehouse employee. Conrad’s time in jail latching on to the teachings of the Greco-Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus forms the novel’s core message, of struggle as a means of ennoblement through self-discovery. The Conrad section works alright at first, the prison sequences accounting for most of the novel’s exciting passages despite some tinny moments here and there, but after an earthquake provides the first of several freak opportunities for Conrad, his part of the novel becomes increasingly contrived and loaded down with thematic concerns.

Wolfe more or less throws in the towel by the novel's end, wrapping up some of the loose plot threads in the form of a final conversation between two men (90% of this book is listening to men talking as processed through the mind of one or more of the participants). Other threads are left dangling.

As frustrating as A Man In Full gets, and as cobbled-together as it feels, there’s a wonderful visceral quality to Wolfe’s writing which draws you in. He captures in fine detail an era of irrational exuberance, when risk-taking and fiscal irresponsibility were almost seen as a kind of sport, before Enron and Fannie Mae brought into sharper focus the pain involved. While not a novel that holds together, A Man In Full offers Wolfe a frame for serving up painterly vignettes of life lived not too long ago, yet very far removed from the world we know now.