It's Friday the 13th, and Tom Wolfe is dressed in camouflage.

His double-breasted blazer, dark as midnight, blends with the garb of some 600 psychiatrists and psychologists who have gathered in Baltimore for a two-day symposium honoring the chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

In 35 years, Wolfe has rarely been seen out of his signature, monochrome uniform: perfectly tailored three-piece suit, tightly tabbed collar, black-and-white faux-spats shoes. But on this day in November he is dressed to fade into the crowd. The spotlight belongs to Dr. Paul R. McHugh, to whom many in attendance owe their careers and to whom Wolfe may owe his life.

Just days into a book tour, Wolfe brims with energy. He is staring mortality in the face and peddling a novel that history may judge to be deathless.

Eleven years in the writing, "A Man in Full" is Wolfe's most ambitious book. Its first printing of 1.2 million copies is almost certainly the largest initial press order for a serious literary novel in American publishing history. Yet "A Man in Full" is beset by hostile reviews. It is set in Atlanta, where fight noises are being made and where Wolfe is due to appear in a few days.

The book is complex, 742 pages. One of its major themes is aging, mortality. The limits of active, productive life. The exhaustion of vital juices. All this blights Wolfe's main character, Charlie Croker.

"Chronological age didn't mean anything," Charlie tells himself early in the book, "but ... Jesus ... he was sixty now ... The thought weighed down his very bones. He tried to conceive picking himself up from out of the dirt again. ... The notion ... sent him sinking so deeply into the lounge chair, he wondered if he could even stand up. ... He began to feel immensely sorry for himself."

Sixty!

Tom Wolfe is 68.

But if your eyeglasses are smudged, or if the light is behind Wolfe as you take him in, he appears 35. He is lean, moves gracefully and at a withering pace, nothing like an old man.

Aging? There is a fading. You can see it in his face.

But it's not in his heart. Not in his head.

Passion drives him. He talks, thinks - his mind sharp - for relentless, long days.

Yet just 28 months ago, that heart almost went out of business. It was saved by quintuple bypass surgery - the repair and partial replacement of every single blood vessel that keeps a heart functioning and is large enough for a surgeon to work on.

And that head? Only 23 months ago, Wolfe went through turmoil that almost broke him - that left him saying that had it not been for precisely the right psychotherapy, "something awful would have happened."

It is almost an ode, a remarkable dedication coming from a writer legendary for his cool detachment:

"With immense admiration, the author dedicates 'A Man in Full' to Paul McHugh whose brilliance, comradeship, and unfailing kindness saved the day. This book would not exist had it not been for you, dear friend."

Soon after the McHugh symposium, Wolfe explains the story behind the dedication. Like "A Man in Full," its theme is mortality.

"Before my heart attack, I was a body snob," Wolfe explains. "I would walk down the street and see somebody with a paunch and say, 'He's history. He's going to die.' But it was I who almost was."

In August 1996, he suffered a heart attack. Quintuple bypass surgery healed quickly. "'I was very cheerful.

Superbly. I think the technical term is 'hypomania.' You are manic, but you are not so manic that you are irrational. You are just happy. I had never been so happy in my entire life.

"I became a different person. I would laugh uproariously in restaurants if somebody said anything even slightly funny. I also was feeling aggressive, which is totally unlike me. In a car, I started shaking my fists at people, blowing my horn.

"I remember once going a week early to a doctor's appointment, not knowing I was a week early. I could not be persuaded. I never talk back to a doctor. I said 'Look, I am here because I am supposed to be here on this day. If you do not have the mental faculties to comprehend this, I do, and this is my appointment.'

"So he said, 'You come right on in here, now, and have a seat right over here.' He was treating me like a lunatic. He was just getting me out of there so I wouldn't explode."

The euphoria lasted 2 months. "During that period I wrote faster than I had written in my life."

Then, suddenly, he hit bottom.

"Riding high was just leading to a crash. I didn't know what was happening. When you are depressed - I now recognize from reading William Styron's marvelous book on that subject - your brain is in constant turmoil and everything is negative.

"The book which I thought had such a fabulous plot now seemed an impossible thing to do. Everything that could go wrong was going to go wrong."

Wolfe, who had long been interested in neuroscience, had met McHugh in 1991 at a conference at Washington and Lee University, Wolfe's alma mater. Now he called the Hopkins psychiatrist, by this time a dear friend.

"I said, 'Something is happening. I don't know what it is. Is there anybody in New York who you could recommend that I go see?' And he said, 'Well, as far as I know the trains are still running from New York to Baltimore.' And I went down to see him.

"I have a feeling that if I had not known Paul, something awful would have happened. At the very least I would have had a nervous breakdown and never finished the book."

Wolfe, in voice and body, is extraordinarily calm, reportorial, as he talks of his life and mortality. He pauses a moment, with a faintly dramatic edge.

"He saved the day."

That, Wolfe says earnestly, let him get on with work, family, everything he cares about. This second life.

Three days after his Baltimore appearance, Wolfe is in Washington, back in uniform, signing books, giving a talk to the National Press Club, doing interviews. At lunch in the Jefferson Hotel, he is approached by a man, impeccably dressed, who hesitates for an instant, says only, "My favorite is 'The Painted Word,' " and then sweeps away. Wolfe smiles, then submits to interrogation:

Q. How does it feel to be a rock star?

A. Well, I can still go into a department store without closing it down. Cary Grant couldn't. I once interviewed him. He said he had to shop in windows and send somebody in to get what he liked. But the volume of the hoopla has really been something.

Q. Unexpected?

A. Well, yes. When I finished the book, I really only felt relieved. It had taken so long. I was not nervous in the way I was when I finished "The Bonfire of the Vanities," my first novel. At that time I had psychosomatic attacks - suddenly, gout. My back went out, whatever that really means. I had heart palpitations that sent me to a cardiologist.

Q. Why the costume?

A. It was by accident. I moved to New York in the spring of 1962. Summer was coming on. I think I had only two suits. I went into a store and bought a white suit. In Richmond, where I grew up, that was not unusual. But it was too heavy to wear in the summer. So I started wearing it in the winter, because I didn't have that many clothes. People were terribly annoyed. Extremely annoyed, and some how resentful. Suddenly getting dressed in the morning became fun. I don't know why I enjoyed other peoples' resentment. We'll have to get Doctor Freud's Emergency Night Line - or maybe Paul McHugh's - to figure that one out.

I just began doing it more and more. The commotion was fun.

Q. Except for Richard Price, I don't know of any novelist except you who is writing about race relations with what I take to be seriousness.

A. People - white writers, anyway - are terribly afraid of it. It's OK to raise the issue of the friction between the two races if, in the course of the story, there arrives some wise person, preferably from the streets, who shows everyone the error of his ways and leads everyone off to a glorious finale. Or you can have the reluctant buddy movie. They really hate each other at the beginning but by the end they have become bosom pals. This is literary etiquette. It all has to work out harmoniously. Alas, modern life is not like that. I think you can do it, write about racial antagonisms in America, if you do it objectively, do the research, the reporting. And you get it right.

Q. What do you read?

A. A lot of Zola, who I currently believe is the best novelist who ever lived. Also Maupassant. I went back through all of Sinclair Lewis, who I think is wonderful. To write "Elmer Gantry," he filled in as a preacher in the summer for ministers who were going on vacation and needed guest preachers. Dickens did a lot of reporting. Balzac also. It was taken for granted in the 19th century that you did this sort of thing.

Q. How did you do the jail stuff in "A Man in Full"? A lot has been written about jails, but I know none better.

A. I think I got it right, at least for the Santa Rita jail. A friend of mine was in that jail. I went to see him. After he got out, he put me in touch with some other people he had met, and they just told me all these amazing stories of life there. I think everything in the book is actual detail of life there.

Q. Could Bill Clinton have come from anywhere but the New South?

A. He probably could. I think of Glenn Treisman's comment at the McHugh symposium. People keep saying, "What was Clinton thinking?" And Treisman shouts: "He wasn't thinking! He was feeling!" The extrovert. The introvert can be controlled through penalties, the threat of penalties. The extrovert is susceptible mainly to the withdrawal of reward. But alas, most of the flagrant figures I can think of were from the South.

Q. Is there really a New South, or is it just the Old South with shorter skirts?

A. The New South was the transition from an agricultural economy to one that isn't. The other form is one that I have a certain amount of fun with in the book, which has to do with the desire of the upper order to be seen as sophisticated and as cultivated as people in New York or San Francisco. What matters culturally takes on a bigger and bigger part of the status of an educated individual. They will do anything not to be taken to be hicks.

The next morning, flying south over Georgia, the pilot announces the descent into Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport. Surely there are names better known to Atlantans than that of Tom Wolfe - Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmy Carter or William Tecumseh Sherman. But his name is ubiquitous here.

In the A Concourse is a Hudson News shop: "A Man in Full" display rises seven levels to the ceiling. Posters advertise a signing.

Further along the concourse, at a larger newsstand, a video plays a promotional tape for the book, repeating itself in an endless loop. Behind a towering layout of "A Man in Full" is a stand with other Wolfe books, in paperback: "The Bonfire of the Vanities," "The Right Stuff," "The Painted Word."

Fifty yards away is Waterstone's Booksellers, with its fancy black marble tiling and red carpeted floor - and enormous quantities of the book, great piles of them. A "national best sellers" table is entirely filled with "A Man in Full." Overwhelmed, on the shady backside of the table, are Anne Rice and Tom Clancy and Stephen King - books that own airports.

In the Nov. 5 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlantan John Huey, who now works in New York, reviewed "A Man in Full" - and dismissed it savagely. He damned the book as trivial - "in the end, it falls apart like a cheap TV movie." He wrote that in reporting on Atlanta Wolfe "gets a lot of it wrong." He instructed readers to ignore the fuss, to "reread 'Gone With the Wind.' And wait for the paperback."

Ignoring its reviewer's scorn, though, the Journal-Constitution is publishing a daily "Wolfe Watch."

Today, it reports, is the big day. "Wolfe himself alights in 'Chocolate Mecca' this very morning. Here's his daily Plan in Full." And then, through television interviews, lectures, a news conference, a speech, a dinner, he is tracked minute by minute.

The evening events are at the Atlanta History Center, which sprawls over 33 landscaped acres in the very high-rent district of Buckhead. There are 400 seats in the main auditorium, where Wolfe is to speak. Two other spaces - seating an additional 268 people - are hooked up for closed-circuit simultaneousness. Lisa Littlefield, the center's publicity director, says they could have sold twice or more that number of tickets had there been room.

Why all the interest?

"Well," she says, "I have talked with very few people who have read the book yet. But we've all seen lots about it, the chatter, the stuff in the newspapers, on television, on the radio. I think a lot of us are reserving our judgment about how Atlanta comes out."

A born diplomat.

At 7 p.m., the large auditorium is packed, chattering. There is talk of the Buckhead Coalition, a business group, rescinding an invitation to Wolfe to speak at their regular lunch. Sam Massell, mayor of Atlanta from 1970 to 1974, chairs the group and, it is said, heard distressing things about the book, which he has not yet read. Wolfe never got the invitation.

The 150 people who are to go from this hall to the $600-a-plate dinner next door are in evening clothes. Mary Rose Taylor, a longtime friend of Wolfe, is organizer of the dinner, which will benefit the Margaret Mitchell House, the small, starkly modest rowhouse in which "Gone With the Wind" was written.

Yes, she says, a handful of hoped-for corporate sponsors and guests turned down the dinner out of "Buckhead anxieties." But it's sold out anyway.

A man, dressed very presentably but not in evening clothes, rises to the microphone in center stage. He holds up a copy of "A Man in Full."

"I'm Rick Beard, and I am on page 237," he barks. There is a roar of laughter, a minor explosion of released tension. He is director of the center. The room quiets.

He speaks again: "This is not a reading of the Buckhead Coalition." More laughter, even more enthusiastic.

Beard introduces Beverly "Bo" DuBose, president of the center and a real estate developer. He is among the large number of men who have been mentioned as possible models for Charlie Croker. DuBose says he knows Wolfe well.

He speaks about Wolfe's assiduousness in studying Atlanta, tells the crowd that he has read the book, in full, and finds it sound and fair. "To those who find fault in this novel," he says, "I have only this to say: If you look in a mirror and don't like what you see - well, don't blame the mirror."

Wolfe takes over. He declares he has had "the time of my life researching this book." He gives a short description, setting up a passage about a dinner party at Charlie Croker's lavish plantation.

He reaches into the breast pocket of his gleamingly white suit and takes out a pair of gleamingly white-rimmed half-glasses. Putting them on, he pauses, gets a laugh. He looks over the lenses, smiles. He is drawing this audience to him. He commences reading.

So far, nothing could be taken amiss. All is well, and well-mannered, in the New South. In the audience, there is genuine, innocent glee. Great waves of empathy, of approval, of something approaching love, begin to flow from his audience as Wolfe reaches the raucous, painful, poignant scene in which Rural Old South ridicules modern, self-conscious liberalism.

The first tough line comes from the mouth of one of Charlie Croker's reddest-necked guests: " 'A ball for AIDS!' " - shouted with scorn.

L There is nervous laughter. Wolfe's voice is strong, defiant:

" 'Hell' - Hale - 'when I was growing up if you got a venereal' - venerl - 'disease, it was a stigma!' "

Wolfe reads surely, quickening, accents deep in red clay, boldly underscoring the ironies. No one can miss the effects, the cruelties, conflicts.

More laughter, people joining this sense of - of what? Of the nakedness of their underside.

Wolfe goes on - " 'Let's riff for syph!' " - reading the dialogue of an increasingly brutally divided dinner party. His pace is fast, unrelenting, his voice now a delicious descant on the rolling laughter.

" 'Let's hop for herpes!' volunteered Judge Opey McCorkle, who was laughing so hard he could hardly get his words out."

So, now, are two-thirds or more of the people in this audience.

What's Wolfe doing? He has led these high-bred Atlantans, tense with anxiety, to a point where they can celebrate the earthy vulgarity deep in their hard-scrabble and fast-fortune heritage.

That should make them very uncomfortable. Instead, he has them laughing - with him, at themselves, in rising waves of purging joy.

At the end of the reading, the audience is invited to participate. Finally, comes the dreaded question: "What do you really think of Atlanta?"

Silence hangs, brittle. Wolfe speaks very softly, his words measured: "This is one of the most exciting cities in America."

There is an almost seismic sense of a psychic burden lifting. Bodies straighten upward. The silence holds. Wolfe speaks again: "I don't know why there haven't been six big novels written about Atlanta - a dozen, 50. As it is now."

But, after all, isn't this book a satire of Atlanta?

The question is asked self-consciously, almost nervously. Wolfe takes it by the hand: "I've tried as best I could ... just to capture Atlanta as it is. I have never liked the word satire. If I got it right, the book is Atlanta."

Later, there is a press conference. A man introduces himself as "The Wolfe Watch Correspondent." The author responds with glee.

"One of the high points of my life," he coos, "is to have learned that there is a daily Wolfe Watch in the Journal-Constitution. It makes me feel like the Beatles."

And what does he think of "A Man in Full?"

He answers gently: "I think it's the best thing I have ever written."

But there's more to come, lots more of this second life of his. His next book, he says, will be about education. "Not graduate schools; I had enough of that, and not primary schools, kindergartens. High school or college or both. I know that it's absolutely dynamite."

The next morning, at 7:20, at the Hudson newsstand in the B Concourse of Hartsfield, not a copy of Wolfe's book is in sight.

A cheerful young man standing beside the cashier's kiosk knifes open one of three cardboard boxes at his feet. On the shelf behind the cash register, the highest, most evident point in the shop, he begins arranging more copies of "A Man in Full."

"They're buying that book?" he is asked.

He looks up, each hand holding a volume. "Faster'n

I can get 'em outta boxes, sir. Guess he's a friend of ours or somethin'."

Something indeed: A man alive.

Pub Date: 11/29/98