Book Review: Tom Wolfe's "A Man In Full"
Down and Out in Atlanta, GA
Forge Contributor, Michelle Gold
I was lent “A Man in Full” by a good friend four years ago. In that time I’ve trundled this heavy nearly eight hundred page book to five different homes and three different states. So with my friend’s recommendation and a feeling that I was finally making use of the thing I opened it with anticipation.
It’s a sprawling novel and clearly an attempt to write a Great American. It’s a good book full of realistic people with realistic problems. Unfortunately, Wolfe's many intersecting story lines come to a screeching halt in a rushed ending that has almost nothing to do with what came before.
Tom Wolfe was a father of “New Journalism” and wrote many works grappling with large ideas; the United States space program and what makes a man fit to travel interstellar, the flower child generation, the sex lives of college students. Here he boldly, if bloatedly, takes up the South for another parading tome.
The story centers first on Charlie Croker, a satrap of the New South. He runs his quail hunting plantation like an antebellum lord, zips around in a Gulfstream, has a second wife thirty two years his junior, a property development empire, an edge city he named after himself north of Atlanta, and he is absolutely terrified. Wolfe welcomes him on the first page saying,
“Charlie Croker, astride his favorite Tennessee walking horse, pulled his shoulders back to make sure he was erect in the saddle and took a deep breath… Ahhhh, that was the ticket… He loved the way his mighty chest rose and fell beneath his khaki shirt and imagined that everyone in the hunting party noticed how powerfully built he was. Everybody…”
He’s a force of nature, a big brute of man that played football for the Tech Yellow Jackets, but for as big and strong, as southern and chivalric, as virile and rich as he is, Charlie is in agonizing thrall to what others think of him. Charlie’s increasingly desperate and abortive attempts to impress everyone, including his own servants, propels much of the writing - towards the end exhaustingly so.
As “A Man in Full” flows on we meet hustlers of every variety. Conrad Hensley, an idealistic and ambitious young father of two trying to feed his family, is laid off from his job at the Croker Food warehouse in Oakland, California and finds himself spiraling through the cracks of the American legal system. Back in Atlanta, when Georgia Tech running back Fareek “The Canon” Fanon, a young man from Atlanta’s toughest neighborhood, is accused of raping the daughter of a pillar of the the city’s white establishment fastidious black lawyer Roger White II is tasked with representing Fanon and keeping the city’s delicate racial balance from boiling over.
Networks of illegal Asian immigrants criss-crossing the continent, housewives trying to reinvent themselves, scheming politicians, daily penitentiary life, shady real estate syndicates, Buckhead mansions, horse breeding, rattlesnake catching, financial transactions. Wolfe gives a kaleidoscope view bordering on being a tour guide for everything he saw while researching the book.
Wolfe is obsessed with physical description. The surface is where all the information is for him, aesthetics almost becomes his primary subject matter and we can learn everything about a place and people by the way they look. We learn about the clothes each character wears no matter how minor: “a new hard-finished worsted navy suit from Gus Carroll, a high-necked tab-collar shirt and a pale-blue crepe de chine necktie with a perfect dimple." What they drive: "a silver-gray four-door Lexus sedan," a "rattling old Hyundai" or a rented "black Volvo 960 with veal-beige leather seats." We learn what they look like, especially the corpulent; On Inman Armholster, a man Charlie is trying to cajole into a business deal:
“everything about Inman was round. He seemed to be made of a series of balls piled one atop the other. His buttery checks and jowls seemed to rest, without benefit of a neck, upon the two balls of fat that comprised his chest, which in turn rested upon a great swollen paunch. Even his arms and legs, which looked much too short, appeared to be made of spherical parts. The down-filled vest he wore over his hunting khakis only made him look that much rounder. Nevertheless, this ruddy pudge was chairman of Armaxco Chemical and about as influential a businessman as existed in Atlanta.”
There are pages of this stuff all describing fat in different ways, after so many jowls, broad shoulders and butter soft paunches you begin to wonder if Wolfe saw Atlanta as one sweaty, gasping, quivering piece of lard. Wolfe is clearly comfortable writing characters unlike himself as evidenced by the overwrought dialects he writes both for black characters and Southern whites.
Wolfe very consciously sets the story in Atlanta, the capital of the New South, the city too busy to hate, a city obsessed with being taken seriously as a cultural capital and big city. The city has no natural advantages, no harbor or navigable river, no mines or minerals, Atlanta’s sole reason for being has always been its potential for development. Charlie, the booster, the developer, the entrepreneur, the visionary, embodies the city. Like Charlie the “Atlanta Way” does not hold up to scrutiny upon further investigation. Wolf examines how the elites of the New South relate to the Old - how much can be taken over from the old? What would still be fashionable too? How many concessions are the elite willing to make, how many can they make and still be in control? Status - this is Wolfe’s eternal theme.
Wolfe takes the audience on a dizzying, wrenching, often funny ride from a glittering art opening, to the Alameda County Jail to a southwest Georgia plantation to a numbing late night shift at a frozen food warehouse. We see debt riddled empires, alpha males beating their chests and thumbing their noses, families torn apart and put back together again. “A Man in Full” is energetic, full of life, bold and flawed.
Michelle is the author of The Guns of August. Gold is a graduate of the University of Mississippi and divides her time between New Orleans and New York City.