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
boy, minimalism is a wash, not to mention a failure of nerve. The
real mission of the American writer is to produce novels of
social observation--the sort of thing Balzac would be dishing up
if he had made it into the 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 20th 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 American 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
ation, 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, Amazon.com