Eleven years after "Bonfire of the Vanities," Tom Wolfe has produced his second novel, "A Man in Full." A century or two from now, if this planet still harbors human life and literacy, it will be read by anyone with a desire to grasp what the late 20th century was all about in America.
Set in Atlanta and rural Georgia, Wolfe's novel shouts and sings with the richly varied voices of regionalism. More importantly, it is a comprehensive tapestry of contemporary American forces, motivations, needs and weaknesses.
With characteristic clarity of eye and deftness of language, Wolfe explores the extremes of conspicuous consumption, the roots of crass materialism, the wild whimsy of high-flying finance and banking, core conflicts within emerging African-American political leadership. He delves deeply into the despair of aging, loneliness and the indomitability of the human spirit.
It is a work of powerful moral values - unforgiving and affirming, damning and redemptive. Wolfe accomplishes all that with the pace, power and economy of narrative line that can hold a reader fast until - as happened to me - there comes the sudden, disbelieving awareness that dawn has risen.
While looking outward instead of inward, it suggests the detail and breadth of vision that distinguish Proust. In the scope of plot and the range of characters, it is Dickensian - but holds artfully back from Dickens' more political, less literary reformist novels. It set me to thinking of Fitzgerald's "Gatsby," Balzac's "Lost Illusions," maybe Mann's "Buddenbrooks," Trollope's "The Way We Live Now."
Critics a generation or so hence will decide if "A Man in Full" rises to those enduring pinnacles. But I find in this book the depth, the fidelity, the seriousness that define the threshold of that canon.
In its detail and acuity, it is a narrative of intense, intricate realism - sharp-edged, cinematic, aural. Yet, finally - in full, so to speak - it is a novel about, and of, spirituality.
That will startle many Wolfe enthusiasts and detractors alike. Since the early 1960s, he has been one of the very best nonfiction writers who have understood, recorded, reported - thus defined - the frontiers of American awareness, imagination and delusion.
His earliest books grew out of his radically innovative reporting for the New York Herald-Tribune, Esquire, Rolling Stone and others. The reporting he and a small handful of others did then came to be called seminal works of "The New Journalism," a now ambiguous term that's better left to history. (At the Herald-Tribune and subsequently, I knew Wolfe, but we have never been close friends.)
Broad canvases
Those articles were exciting because of Wolfe's mastery of language, rhythm, sound - but above all for his capacity to use microscopically observed details to produce panoramic group portraits. Capturing the American zeitgeist, they were important. They inspired thousands of imitators of his techniques and hundreds of serious followers of his ideas. They changed journalism.
Wolfe captured the essence of America's breaking-edge trends, affectations, cultural foments - with dispassion, clarity and depth that it took years, or decades, for scholarship and other major writers to catch up with.
Wolfe was the first to write with authority about the drug fad among America's advantaged classes. He virtually defined the psychedelic. He tracked with incomparable fidelity the rootless, rebellious stirrings in the hearts and lives of the Vietnam-era disillusioned youth - and the rise of confrontation politics in minority leadership and its celebration by the privileged guilt-afflicted.
He tracked the Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon among the consumers of the 1960s and 1970s postmodern art market. In perhaps his greatest nonfiction accomplishment, he found the cosmic drama and the contrived theatricality of the space program - "The Right Stuff." He ran to ground the foundations, aesthetic and commercial, of contemporary architecture. And more.
He did all that in a manner arising from classic reporting techniques. Yet it did enrage. His work was so fastidious that is was nearly impossible to attack - except with head-on tantrums, with raging pique. But I remember dozens, more, parties from the late 1960s into the late 1980s, in New York especially, where Wolfe would be discussed by Major Personages from the worlds he had written about.
They always reminded me of Saki's great short story, "Tobermory," the tale of a house cat that was able to talk - but, far more dangerously, was able to listen, and then to repeat with faultless precision the cruelties of very private conversations at a very elaborate British country-weekend house party.
Tobermory, of course, had to be poisoned. Such is the success of American felony-homicide laws, that Wolfe has not been. But not for any lack of enthusiasm for the job among many people he has reported upon.
Wolfe's perceptions of people did not change in his leap from journalism to his first novel. "Bonfire's" main character, a New York financial superstar named Sherman McCoy, was easy to despise, impossible to defend. No one else was much more endearing. "Bonfire" battled on for 659 pages taking no prisoners, leaving wounded everywhere, and without a medal earned by anybody, for anything. That book ended so declaratively whimperingly that I almost expected to find the words "Hollow Men" at the point where "Finis" used to appear.
Not so, "A Man in Full." Its people are far more deeply, convincingly human. There's not a shred of sentimentality here, but many of the characters, while more than obviously flawed, are likable, even lovable.
The cast is led by Charlie Croker, the "man in full." He scrambled his way up from dirt-poor farm country, as football megahero, dauntlessly ambitious. Now his sprawling real-estate development and food service empire is sore beset by financial problems.
At 60, he faces the meanest phalanx of bankers I have ever seen in literature or life, and is ritually humiliated by them. Leaving that meeting, he flies off to his plantation in his private jet, and though hobbled by a painful, gimpy knee, an ancient football wound, captures a six-foot monster rattlesnake with his bare hands, cages it and turns to his chief financial officer and orders the firing of 900 employees in one of his subsidiary corporations. Then he goes off to lunch.
But Croker is troubled about his 28-year-old, perfectly fit trophy wife. He is being ground in the mills of Time and Mortality. The murmurs of limitations begin to haunt him. He looks back to a point only four years before, to a moment on a beach with the then 24-year-old woman he soon will marry:
"They could have been caught at any moment!-him!-the great star!-fifty-six years old!-rutting away in the sand!-sex-crazed, like a dog in the park! But that was the thing . . . At fifty-five or fifty-six you still think you're a young man. You still think your power and energy are boundless and eternal! You still think you are going to live forever! And in fact you're attached to your youth only by a thread, not a cord, not a cable, and that thread can snap at any moment, and it will snap soon in any case. And then where are you?"
Then there is Roger White II, a successful mid-career African-American lawyer, with deep connections in the city's white power structure and conflicting political yearnings, a complex man. There are Wesley Dobbs Jordan, mayor of Atlanta, a leader of the black economic, social and business elite, Solomonic in political awareness; Fareek ("The Cannon") Fanon, the All-American superhero running back for Georgia Tech, overflowing with arrogance, "attitude" and glands. Conrad Hensley, child of San Francisco hippies, begins as an earnestly decent, ambitious laborer in a San Francisco freezer-plant that happens to be a Croker subsidiary.
There are more, lots more: Two bank officers, the yin and the yang of unscrupulous high finance. Trophy wives preening. Discarded first wives showing their vulnerability and courage. The population of a prison to which Conrad Hensley is unfairly sentenced is agonizingly convincing - and terrifying.
City, country
Wolfe wonderfully brings to life the city of Atlanta, rendered as a town in full, and "Turpmtine," Croker's 29,000-acre, south Georgia plantation, of antebellum opulence, maintained for quail shooting, show and hubris.
Gradually, a half-dozen major plot lines interweave. Charlie grapples with a half-billion in bank debt he can't meet. Conrad suffers unfairnesses that make the Biblical Job seem like a Teletubby. Intricate politics rage. Race tensions intrude on every life. Banking is writ large, both hilariously and hideously.
Brilliantly ornamental - powerfully iconographic - scenes pop up whenever the main narrative line is about to flag: Thoroughbred horses breed (in perhaps the most relentlessly vivid description of that loveless act in all literature). Quail are shot. Art is marketed. Pace never relents.
Throughout the book, the power of ethic, the force of principle, morality are strongest among the weakest. People of success are almost devoid of bedrock principle. They have been clever. Cleverness is to be able to play well behind the rules, aside the rules - the fiddle, the trick, the sleight of hand.
But principle is never out of sight. It lurks. It battles.
The book will be damned by two sects. One is academics who insist all "serious" fiction must hew the lines of culture theory, whose principles - if that is the word - produce work that I find to be largely gibberish. The other is the extreme left, indomitable in spite of the collapse of state socialism and its exposure as cruel fraud, still insisting all literature must serve the Revolution.
Offending those demands, Wolfe's work is devoted to real people living real lives, in a world that's always uncertain. It seeks truth with no allegiances to cause or doctrine.
Guiding providence
Ultimately, this book is a gargantuan declaration of belief in private integrity and in the miracle of human will. Wolfe has delicious fun with the work of the Stoics, through Conrad's happenstance discovery of the dialogues of Epictetus of Hierapolis (55 to 135 A.D.). Oversimplified, Epictetus' Stoicism holds that all events on earth are governed by divine providence. Moral virtue is the only good, wickedness the only evil; material goods and public honor are inconsequential. Conrad cannot fail to remind an attentive reader of Voltaire's "Candide," without a Doctor Pangloss.
If that sounds heavy, it is not. Wolfe's interplaying of the innocent Conrad's discovery of Stoicism is a delightful romp. But it also builds to a very serious examination of human meaning.
The book's ending seemed to me at first a little too neat. Suspense is attenuated, sustained up to the last page of action. There are surprises all along, and they work. The narrative builds an enormous accumulation of tensions. Surely, they should all be resolved in some cataclysmic manner, with a classic catastrophe, a bottom-lining of forces and themes?
But no. To do so might have fulfilled formulaic assumptions of drama - and of political/cultural doctrines. It would, however, have been superficial. It would have been false to Wolfe's more complex - and I believe far wiser - vision of human truths. The book ends well, in harmony with its premises.
As a journalist, Wolfe led and set standards of craft for 30 years. As a journalist who was a novelist in the making, he extended his reach in "Bonfire." With "A Man in Full," he emerges as a very major novelist.
The world is not neat. The human animal is not a sheep. Nor a tool or toy of extraneous forces - economic, social, scientifically determinable. To the contrary, humankind is infinitely singular and rich and courageous and unpredictable - and beautiful. Wolfe celebrates those enduring qualities with an intelligence and craft seldom seen in modern novels. He has produced a magnificently wise - and loving - work of art.
Pub Date: 11/08/98