A Man in Full
Reviewed by John H. Adams, April 1, 1999
The scene is post-Scarlett O’Hara’s Atlanta, the southern citadel that has recovered fabulously from its late fiery unpleasantness to become the Vatican of the commercial South. It is a city where the deal-makers who plot within towering glass buildings, Old Money and the nouveau riche dwell harmoniously with indigenous Southerners.
Well, then there’s Tom Wolfe’s discovery of Atlanta’s underbelly of inequitable materialism, which he describes in a rambling essay that lumbers for 742 pages, and then tumbles to incredulity, a literal Zeus ex machina.
With hubris in title (A Man in Full) and condescension in style (until the very end the author translates every southernism into fifth-grade English), Wolfe has produced a fat work that is lean in thought. But, it’s still fun to listen to the echoes of a region and to tune into a writer who is doing his best to avoid political correctness.
Being politically correct, in public affairs, is the centerpiece of today’s Atlanta. It is a city in which white corporations and profiteers make huge deals, for land, highways, infrastructure, with a government that is elected by the overwhelming black majority. Wolfe sneaks behind the scenes to discover that the moments of progress require some political and racial extortions.
Wolfe’s principal victim is Charlie Croker, a developer with a high-rise ego, a loud mouth, a power (second) wife, a 29,000-acre quail plantation, a gimpy leg from his Georgia Tech football games, jet planes and more debts than assets. Croker is coming down, down, down, down, like Jonah, and he would have drowned without the divine intervention of Zeus.
Thus, the hero gains a quirky redemption. It is less than one might expect from the title. A Man in Full begs a Chalcedonian resolution, even an allegorical messiah, a modern Billy Budd. But Wolfe permits nary a snippet of Christian thought to elide into A Man in Full. He settles for unconvincing secular redemtpion of a self-righteous, rubish Georgia cracker whose one brief moment of truth brought down his empire.
But we should not have expected Wolfe, a fine writer with a minimalist’s world view, to educe a better person from A Man in Full. Since The Right Stuff, and its appealing heroes, Wolfe has produced two cult novels: the cults of Wall Street (Bonfire of the Vanities) and now Atlanta.
Wolfe writes to entertain, and that he does remarkably better than most American novelists. He has a laser eye and a sonar ear for details. Some scenes (Croker being sandbagged by bankers and hosting a quail hunt and dinner) are roaring testimony to the power of the written word, which when rightly crafted, can still produce sweat, racing heartbeats, anger and guffaws.
But those vignettes are fleeting, and so, we suspect, will be the Charlie Crokers whose emerging human fullness means no more than sillyputty. It is a sad truth that such a fine craftsman as Tom Wolfe imparts the sort of amusement that makes you regret the price you paid to escape boredom.