BookBravo.com - A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, ISBN: 0-374-27032-5

A Man in Full
by Tom Wolfe, Farrar, Straus, Giroux; ISBN: 0-374-27032-5
Week 22 (Dec. 2nd, 2002)

I finally read A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe's 1998 blockbuster. Unless you happened to be in a coma at the time, you will certainly remember the non-stop publicity when the book came out, and Tom Wolfe in his dapper white suit on every TV talk show imaginable. I don't recall him doing Oprah, but perhaps I blinked for a second he certainly was in evidence everywhere else.

Personally, I never read a Tom Wolfe book when it first comes out. I resist him, his style and all the hype. It s not one thing, it s everything. It s the sentences he writes that are overloaded with exclamation points and italics. Paragraphs such as (and I quote): RAM YO BooTY! RAM YO BooTY! Tom Wolfe is overkill to the max, to use some hyperbole myself. He is like eating cake with ten scoops of ice-cream on top. Yet I always give in eventually, generally a few years down the line, because the guy is actually extremely talented, original, and lots of fun to read.

A Man in Full is a marvelous novel on many levels, the story of Charlie Croker, an Atlanta real estate tycoon with a huge appetite for money, horses, private jets, and young women. Alas, poor Charlie s world is collapsing. At the start of the story he is more than a hundred million dollars in debt, besieged on every front his creditors, his young wife, his health, the sagging real estate market, his son, his first (older) wife, the works. Tom Wolfe pulls off a small miracle by making us actually care what happens to Charlie as the furies circle around him, snatching away his toys, bringing him howling to his knees.

It s a big book too big, really and we have a number of characters who spin around the circumference of Charlie s ruin. There s Fareek the Cannon Fanon, a black college football star who has unfortunately date-raped a young white girl whose father is one of the mainstays of snooty Atlanta society. And Roger Too White White II, a preppy black lawyer on his way up the ladder of success who is assigned to defend Fareek. And Wesley Dobbs Jordan, the slick black mayor of Atlanta. And many more, including a young white loser, Conrad Hensely, who is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods in Oakland, gets arrested, sent to prison, sees the light . . . and ends up saving Charlie back in Georgia in a most improbable (and unbelievable) manner.

This is a comedy of greed gone amuck, a truly American tale that is as contemporary as Enron and Arthur Anderson. The book is 740 pages, and herein lies its main problem. Unfortunately, when a writer is as successful as Tom Wolfe, editors no longer edit, they simply let you do whatever you want. Which is a pity, because this would have been a much better novel with just a bit of discipline on the author s part, and a crash diet to lose 200 . . . perhaps even 300 pages of fat.

In the end, I liked A Man in Full despite its excess and many faults, just as I end up liking all of Tom Wolfe s writing. In his own satirical way, he gets to the root of Americana, capturing the go-get spirit of the 1980s and 90s, those prosperous years that gave us mad materialism and a lack of any morality other than pathological avarice. Frankly, a fictitious Charlie Croker is more fun to encounter than the truth of the matter: those dead souls like Kenneth Lay whose greed causes such destructive harm.