Book Review: A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe (1998)

The obligatory photo of my Tom Wolfe bookshelf, with 1998's A Man in Full front and center. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Tom Wolfe on the cover of Time magazine, 1998.

Atlanta! Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler! Coca-Cola! Hank Aaron! Phil Niekro! Dale Murphy! Chipper Jones! Martin Luther King! Usher! CNN! In his second novel, 1998’s A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe tell us what Atlanta at the close of the millennium was really like. And readers discover a city that the mayor fears could be shattered along racial lines. 

A Man in Full was a huge best-seller when it was published in 1998. It had been 11 years since the smashing success of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and the public was hungry for another dose of Wolfe’s writing. In the run up to publication, Wolfe was featured on the cover of Time magazine. A Man in Full was number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list for 10 straight weeks. 

The main character of A Man in Full is real estate developer Charlie Croker, who is 60 years old, newly married to a much younger second wife, and deeply in debt. Tom Wolfe once said in a 1976 interview, “This country really is made up of half failed athletes and half women.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.99) Charlie Croker certainly falls into the former category, as he is constantly reminded of his college glory on the gridiron for Georgia Tech. Croker was known as “the Sixty Minute Man,” as he played both offense and defense. 

Much like Sherman McCoy, the main character in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Croker gets pushed to the brink of ruin during the course of the novel. He has to endure a grueling and humiliating “workout session” with the bank that financed his loans, as the bank threatens to start seizing assets. 

Roger White II, a successful African American attorney in Atlanta, is one of the other main characters. Because of his tendency to fit in with white people, his nickname is “Roger Too White.” 

The third main character is Conrad Hensley. Conrad works outside of Oakland in a freezer warehouse of Croker Global Foods, a part of Charlie Croker’s business empire. Because Conrad isn’t in Atlanta with the other main characters, you just keep waiting for the time when he will start interacting with the rest of the cast. As far as I was concerned, it took way too long for Conrad’s story to get to that point. 

Conrad’s storyline just feels shoehorned into the book—it doesn’t feel natural or organic. So then there’s less tension in it, even though he goes through the most dramatic events of any of the main characters. He goes to prison! He miraculously escapes from prison after an earthquake! But I started to resent Conrad, because his chapters took me away from Atlanta and Roger Too White and Charlie Croker.

However, for all of my complaining about Conrad, the chapter when he has the day from hell, Chapter 11, is wonderfully written. Wolfe fully immerses you in Conrad’s troubles, as his car gets towed, one thing leads to another, and he eventually assaults a worker at the car impound lot. Wolfe is able to make you care about both Charlie Croker and Conrad Hensley, and that’s a real achievement. Wolfe has the imagination and creativity to put you into Conrad’s shoes. But he’s also done enough of the reporting work to make it all feel real. It feels real emotionally AND factually—and this is really what Wolfe is getting at in all of his writings about fiction—it’s not enough to just be emotionally real, fiction should also tell you something about the lives of the people it describes. If fiction isn’t connected to the real world that people inhabit, it’s not going to produce an emotional response in your readers. The accumulation of details gives Wolfe’s writing more weight. Sure, maybe he totally made up the geography around Oakland as he describes Conrad’s cross-town travels as he attempts to get his car back. But I doubt it. As Wolfe describes Conrad’s travels in depth, it builds your sympathy and interest in the character’s problems. 

While he’s in prison, Conrad, through a shipping error by a bookstore, comes across the writings of the Stoic philosophers—Seneca, Epictetus, and all the rest. This totally changes Conrad’s attitude towards prison, and life in general. I’m not sure what Wolfe’s point in focusing so much on the Stoic philosophers is. Was he an adherent of Stoicism? Did he think that Stoicism would be a useful philosophy for most Americans to follow? Or did he just re-read the Stoics in 1996 and think, “I think I’ll put this in the novel.” Without giving too much away, Stoicism plays a significant role in the ending of the novel, which is pretty anticlimactic. 

The main plot of the book feels quite contemporary, as it concerns an alleged sexual assault. The victim is the white daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta, while the alleged perpetrator is the star running back at Georgia Tech. And he’s black, from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Atlanta. Wes Jordan, the black mayor of Atlanta, is up for re-election, and he naturally wants to prevent the situation from escalating into a race riot. So he enlists his old friend Roger White to talk to Charlie Croker and see if Croker will make a statement supporting the running back, thinking that having a prominent white citizen on his side will prevent the issue from splitting along racial lines.

Race is one of the main issues in both The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, and I admire Tom Wolfe’s willingness to engage with the issue. Wolfe wasn’t afraid to write about African American characters. You can judge for yourself how successful he was at creating and writing about these characters. But I think it’s to his credit that he was willing to explore the difficult issue of race in America. 

Wolfe’s sense of humor is on display in his naming of companies. There’s Maws and Gullet, (p.77) a food service corporation. The law firm that Roger White works for is Wringer, Fleasom, and Tick. (p.191) Other law firms mentioned are Fogg, Nackers, Rendering, and Lean, (p.237) Clockett, Paddet, Skynnham, and Glote, (p.251)and Tripp, Snayer, and Billings. (p.346) 

Attentive Wolfe readers will see pet phrases of his come up time and again. “Shank to flank” makes several appearances, as does the phrase “season of the rising sap.” Wolfe’s favorite fake product Streptolon, which appears in nearly all of his books, is mentioned. (There’s even a form of it called Streptofoam, mentioned on page 168.) And only Tom Wolfe could have written a fictitious hip-hop song with the lyrics “shanks akimbo.” (p.120) 

Wolfe’s usual keen eye for details is evident throughout A Man in Full. One of my favorite terms that Wolfe uses is “pizza grenade necktie.” “It was the sort of tie that looked as if a pepperoni-and-olive pizza had just exploded on your shirtfront.” (p.98) Those ties were ubiquitous in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and I might have a few pizza grenade neckties left over from that era, but I don’t wear them anymore.

Sartorially, it seems that Roger White is a stand-in for Wolfe’s own style. One of the funnier moments in the novel is when White tries to dress down: “Hence the suede shoes and the tennis collar and the knit necktie and the twill pants and the tweed hacking jacket. Casual. Inconspicuous. Sure. What planet had he been beamed down from?” (p.404) One can imagine Tom Wolfe dressing down in a similar manner. 

Anyone else who remembers the late 1990’s can understand Charlie Croker’s thoughts about the word paradigm: “But this word paradigm absolutely drove him up the wall, so much so that he had complained to the Wiz about it. The damned word meant nothing at all, near as he could make out, and yet it was always ‘shifting,’ whatever it was. In fact, that was the only thing the ‘paradigm’ ever seemed to do. It only shifted.” (p.71) 

A critique I had as I read A Man in Full is that there are parts of the book that are overwritten, which might be inevitable in a 780-page paperback. Too many times Wolfe describes a gesture one of the characters makes, and then tells us what it means, which just seems unnecessary. Here’s just one example: “Roger looked at Wes with wide eyes, as if to say, ‘What does this mean?’” (p.540) 

Reviews for A Man in Full were generally positive, but two of the most famous novelists in America both disliked the book. John Updike and Norman Mailer both wrote scathing reviews of A Man in Full. Updike’s review of A Man in Full dismissed the book as falling short of literature, even “literature in a modest aspirant form.” Mailer’s review took a similar tack, as it was full of questions like: “Is one encountering a major novel or a major best seller?” There’s a bit of the pot calling the kettle black here, as Mailer writes as though he had never hankered after having best-sellers of his own. 

Mailer does have words of praise for the book, but in the best Midwestern, passive-aggressive style, there are always reservations: “Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer. How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great—his absence of truly large compass.” Mailer is still thinking that American writing is like a heavyweight boxing match! Thank God Wolfe didn’t have the stamina! He broke down in the fifth round! He was busy looking at the referee’s shoes, trying to figure out what brand they were, and then WHOMP! Norman finally landed that right hook!

Novelist John Irving joined in the complaining as well, and the whole mess was chronicled in Wolfe’s essay “My Three Stooges,” collected in Wolfe’s 2000 essay collection, Hooking Up. (I reviewed Hooking Up here, with more details about Wolfe’s feuds with Mailer and Updike.) My own thought is that Irving, Updike, and Mailer were all jealous of the huge sales and media attention Wolfe was garnering. Plus, in the cases of Mailer and Updike, there was simmering resentment of Wolfe that was left over from what he had written about them in the 1960’s. 

In some ways, A Man in Full might be a more impressive novel than The Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s more virtuosic, as Wolfe takes you through all of these different strata of society. Wolfe captures the voices of so many different people throughout the book. Even the minor characters are very fully drawn.

However, I don’t think that A Man in Full captured the zeitgeist in the same way that Bonfire did. I think Bonfire has become cultural shorthand for “1980’s capitalism run amok” whereas I don’t know what the shorthand takeaway of A Man in Full would be. There’s certainly a lot of capitalism run amok on view in A Man in Full. 

Wolfe’s view of fiction was that it should try to capture the spirit of the time and place in which it was written, and he strongly urged novelists to go out and observe things the way a journalist would. In his 1989 essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Wolfe wrote: “At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.” That’s exactly what Wolfe did with A Man in Full. 

A Man in Full has its flaws, but, taken in full, it has much to say about America in the late 1990’s, and is a superb example of Tom Wolfe’s writing at its best.