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A Man in Full
by Tom Wolfe
Product Group: Book
ISBN: B00061XNNO
Hardcover: 742 pages
Edition: 1st trade ed
SKU: 29893
Condition: New
Comments: THE HARDBACK BOOK! FARRAR, STRAUS, 1998. THE UNABRIDGED 1ST EDITION. HARDCOVER WITH GILT LETTERING, DUST JACKET AND PAGES ARE BRAND NEW! Rapid shipping w/FREE tracking. GREAT PACKAGING . Air Mail. YW.RD
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com Review
Ever since he published his classic 1972 essay "Why They Aren't Writing the Great American Novel Anymore," Tom Wolfe has made his fictional preferences loud and clear. For New Journalism's poster boy, minimalism is a wash, not to mention a failure of nerve. The real mission of the American writer is to produce fat novels of social observation--the sort of thing Balzac would be dishing up if he had made it into the Viagra era. Wolfe's manifesto would have had a hubristic ring if he hadn't actually delivered the goods in 1987 with The Bonfire of the Vanities. Now, more than a decade later, he's back with a second novel. Has the Man in White lived up to his own mission? On many counts, the answer would have to be yes. Like its predecessor, A Man in Full is a big-canvas work, in which a multitude of characters seems to be ascending or (rapidly) descending the greasy pole of social life: "In an era like this one," a character reminds us, "the twentieth century's fin de siècle, position was everything, and it was the hardest thing to get." Wolfe has changed terrain on us, to be sure. Instead of New York, the focus here is Atlanta, Georgia, where the struggle for turf and power is at least slightly patinated with Deep South gentility. The plot revolves around Charlie Croker, an egomaniacal good ol' boy with a crumbling real-estate empire on his hands. But Wolfe is no less attentive to a pair of supporting players: a downwardly mobile family man, Conrad Hensley, and Roger White II, an African American attorney at a white-shoe firm. What ultimately causes these subplots to converge--and threatens to ignite a racial firestorm in Atlanta--is the alleged rape of a society deb by Georgia Tech football star Fareek "The Cannon" Fanon. Of course, a detailed plot summary would be about as long as your average minimalist novel. Suffice it to say that A Man in Full is packed with the sort of splendid set pieces we've come to expect from Wolfe. A quail hunt on Charlie's 29,000-acre plantation, a stuffed-shirt evening at the symphony, a politically loaded press conference--the author assembles these scenes with contagious delight. The book is also very, very funny. The law firms, like upper-crust powerhouse Fogg Nackers Rendering & Lean, are straight out of Dickens, and Wolfe brings even his minor characters, like professional hick Opey McCorkle, to vivid life: In true Opey McCorkle fashion he had turned up for dinner wearing a plaid shirt, a plaid necktie, red felt suspenders, and a big old leather belt that went around his potbelly like something could hitch up a mule with, but for now he had cut off his usual torrent of orotund rhetoric mixed with Baker Countyisms. Readers in search of a kinder, gentler Wolfe may well be disappointed. Retaining the satirist's (necessary) superiority to his subject, he tends to lose his edge precisely when he's trying to move us. Still, when it comes to maximalist portraiture of the American scene--and to sheer, sentence-by-sentence amusement--1998 looks to be the year of the Wolfe, indeed. --James Marcus
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Product Description
Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble.A decade ago, The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. This time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist.
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Customer Reviews
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Atlanta Burns Again
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-08-11
It took Tom Wolfe more than decade to finally publish his second novel. Using the same journalistic skills which made him famous, A MAN IN FULL sees Wolfe turning his keen eye and withering criticism south, to Atlanta, where we first meet Charlie Croker. One time college football star, now a middle aged businessman whose spectacular success has just hit the brick wall real, real hard. Too much to lose, he finds himself with few options to get himself out of the hole he has dug.
One option, though, takes the form of Fareek `the Cannon' Fanon. Born of the city's ghetto, now a star football player at Georgia Tech, he displays all the arrogance, ignorance, and dysfunction that years in the slum followed by athletic success is able to produce. Accused of raping the daughter of a prominent white family, he needs Croker's help to get past this block to his career and, perhaps more importantly, the endorsements that come with it.
Wolfe is especially strong in his portrayal of Fanon. As he is innocent, a lesser writer would have made Fanon the object of pure, unadulterated sympathy. It is a testament to Wolfe's strength that he is, instead, thoroughly unlikeable. The inevitable meeting between Croker and Fanon is among the most wince-inducingly hilarious scenes ever drawn on the fictitious written page.
And can Wolfe paint a picture. A MAN IN FULL is filled with numerous scenes that truly make one wonder how Wolfe really does it. Another major character, Conrad Hensley, finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss of the American legal system after an incident so well described that Hensley's fate seems almost inevitable in retrospect.
Tossed in for good measure are a medley of politicians, race hustlers, and innocent bystanders, all of which help bring things together. Tom Wolfe's novels may not be the happiest books out there. But they are among the most entertaining and, true to form, among the most realistic. A MAN IN FULL is, in my opinion, Wolfe's best and, even a number of years after its publishing, easily withstands the test of time.
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Stoics rule
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-08-10
I'm reading A Man in Full for maybe the fifth time and it is great. First, get ahold of the hardcover edition. This book is too good to struggle through in the form of a fat, misshapen paperback with tiny type. You will want to own this book and keep it.
Begin with chapter IX, The Superfluous Woman. Then go to Chapter I, Chocolate Mecca, and what the heck, Chapter V, The Suicidal Freezer Unit. Those three terrific chapters could stand as short stories.
Now that you know you are experiencing Tom Wolfe at the very top of his form, you may as well begin at the Prologue and read the whole book. It is just too good to miss. I've been a Wolfe fan since The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and I loved most of them. I can't tell you how many times I've read the marvelous Bonfire of the Vanities, and I'm eager to read it again, but A Man in Full is joyous, hilarious, and life-affirming, while Bonfire is an Aristotelian tragedy, a tale of private desperation against a backdrop of public decline.
A Man in Full is sheer enjoyment. I pity any misguided quibbler who can read this outstanding novel and somehow not get it, not appreciate it, not be knocked out, not see its lasting value.
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Two Novels: One Big, One Small
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-07-24
When I first penned this review, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full was the best selling book in the country, a huge success critically and commercially, while Philip K. Dick's Humpty Dumpty in Oakland was not published during his lifetime, and has been little noticed since (though a new paperback edition is coming to Amazon in September '08). Wolfe's is a large book, sprawling, with dozens of characters, while Dick's Oakland book is small in scope. Yet the connection is there: both books contain thematic elements in common, and as American novels both are rewarding and worth reading.
Like its famous predecessor, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full is an attempt to capture the zeitgeist of The Way We Live Now. (Come to think of it, Trollope's novel would also make a worthy comparison.) The bull-like 60 year-old former Georgia Tech football hero and real estate developer Charlie Croker is in trouble: he's upside-down to the tune of 850 million dollars, and things are starting to unravel.
The first thing I noticed about the book is its cinematic quality: every chapter plays out like a dramatic scene in a movie. Here's a thought that ran through my mind: "It would be a no-brainer to make this into a great film. Of course, that's what they said about Bonfire too. Tom Hanks to play Charlie Croker, anyone?"
Charlie owns a 29,000 acre plantation down in Baker County (well, actually his corporation, Croker Global, owns it) along with numerous corporate jets and planes. And Charlie's firm also owns the big white elephant that's to blame for his "situation": Croker Concourse, a huge mixed use development with a nearly empty 40 story tower, north of Atlanta in Cherokee county, beyond the ring road. Charlie was too far ahead of his time: you can see Atlanta's skyline from his tower, but you can't get there from here.
An early scene sets the stage for Charlie's humiliation: a "workout meeting" at his primary lender, PlannersBanc. Charlie arrives at the meeting with a huge entourage, planning on bluffing his way through a minor annoyance, but instead finds out that his status has been dramatically downgraded, from customer to "s***head." It is the job of the bank's workout team to issue a wakeup call to large debtors-in-denial, making them sweat until their dripping shirt hangs like saddlebags. This is just one of the many brightly-lit scenes that is larger than life, and perhaps destined for the big screen.
Dick's book, on the other hand, is small screen, in black-and-white: a period drama set in the late `50s, the kind of thing Rod Serling was so good at, in Patterns, or Requiem for a Heavyweight. Like Wolfe, a story about people on the way down, except these are not millionaires. Jim Patterson owns a garage in downtown Oakland that he's selling for health reasons. He is afraid of having a heart attack under a car, where no one can see or help him. Jim leases out part of his parking lot to Al Miller, a small time used-car salesman, whose life is thrown into chaos when Jim sells out. They become strangely involved with a prominent businessman named Harmon, who owns a record label. Is he aboveboard, or a swindler?
Strangely, both books offer a vision of the Bay Area, though Wolfe's book is set primarily in Atlanta. After the workout session, Charlie decides to appease the bank by laying off 10 percent of his workforce in Croker Global' s frozen food business. Cut to: the frozen food warehouse in El Cerrito, CA: a surreal world of frozen breath and nose icicles, as big-armed workers in spacesuits toil in a freezing zero degree warehouse for eight hours, hefting heavy cartons off pallets of frozen food for the truckers waiting in warmth and comfort beyond the serrated plastic curtains, destined for customers like the Santa Rita Jail in Pleasanton. In a horrifying series of misadventures, an inoffensive young character named Conrad Hensley finds himself thrown out of work at Croker Global, and ends up in that very frightening penal institution.
Meanwhile, Dick's Oakland exists 50 years in the past, a time remote and different from ours, yet showing all the guideposts that led to the present. Back then, Oakland was a white city, with "Negroes." A middle-class man like Jim, the garage owner, would deal only with whites, while lower middle class Al's best friend happens to be colored. Over in Marin county, north of San Francisco, Highway 101 is extending further northward, to Novato and beyond: the public housing projects in Marin City have just gone up. The freeway system in the East Bay is already in place along the bayshore, and smog and traffic is already noticeable in 1958.
The resolution of Wolfe's book, and the intersection of Charlie and Conrad, involves an almost-Dickian device: their conversion to the religious philosophy of Epictetus: Stoicism. The powerful applicability of this to their situation lends the force of Greek drama to their story, and ultimately offers a kind of calming closure to the book.
I find Dick endlessly fascinating. Certainly, the author was fascinated with mental illness (Clans of the Alphane Moon, et al.) and was able to portray it dramatically. He foreshadows Jim's fatal heart attack with eerie scenes of his "losing it," and Al's chronic lying and inaction are also far from healthy. In addition to his character's weird internal lives, the other aspect of Dick's exploration of insanity is in his surreal and self-referential plotting. For instance, when Jim visits Marin County Gardens, (echoes of "Chicken Pox Prospects" in Palmer Eldritch,) the salesperson is reading Poul Anderson's Brain Wave, and rants about pot-boiler science fiction.
I felt a palpable sense of shifting from the real world to an alternate reality when Al Miller gets a job at Teach Records (named after the real Blackbeard, Edward Teach, since it is a "pirate label,") and was assigned to record electronically-enhanced Barbershop quartet music, since it was projected to be the next big trend in American music. (!) One of the most frightening scenes, when Al gets off the bus in Salt Lake City and is immediately arrested and flown back to Oakland, is an echo of numerous similar paranoia-inducing developments in other books. It happens to Decker in Androids, and is intimately related to the famous scene in Time Out of Joint when the hot dog stand disappears before the protagonist's eyes, replaced by a fortune cookie-sized piece of paper reading: hot dog stand.
You won't have any trouble finding Wolfe's large and popular book, and now Humpty Dumpty in Oakland is also reprinted (virtually everything Dick wrote is now back in print!) and available on Amazon. I recommend them both.
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Save A Tree--Avoid This Book!
Rating  (1)
Date: 2008-07-18
A Man in Full wastes 371 sheets of paper via 742 written pages. Wolfe's failed attempts to develop the book's five main characters, via repetitive and overly descriptive passages, will force readers to resist the urge to give up on the book and toss it in the garbage.
My biggest disappointment with A Man in Full is the book's incredibly weak ending. After enduring the self-inflicted pain of reading the book's first 729 pages, Wolfe reveals the story ending for each of the five character's via a conversation between one main character and the mayor of Atlanta. The mayor describes what has become of four of the five main characters, and what the future holds for the fifth, with whom he is speaking. Despite editorial approval to use 742 pages, Wolfe clearly struggled to conclude A Man in Full, and did so in a manner that will leave readers utterly disappointed.
I would normally consider passing along a book that I have read to another reader. With Man in Full, however, I intend to provide a service to any potential readers by shredding and recycling the 341 pages. Perhaps that way, the resources will be put to a more productive use.
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Words escape me, but not Wolfe
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-03-31
This book defies explanation. Know only that it has unforgettable passages, compelling characters and a plot that doesn't really matter at all.
I can't say that I really enjoyed the book, but I haven't ever forgotten it. Sometimes I still think of things like horses breeding, men with backs like a jack bull, cons doing dips in the bathroom and a meat packer with hands like vises.
Oh, and it introduced me to "Freaknik"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaknik).
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