A Man in Full [Hardcover]

Tom Wolfe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1998

The setting is Atlanta, Georgia - a racially mixed, late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 29,000 acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife, and a half-empty office complex with a staggering load of debt. Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, idealistic young father of two, is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods warehouse near Oakland and finds himself spiraling into the lower depths of the American legal system. And back in Atlanta, when star Georgia Tech running back Fareek "the Canon" Fanon, a homegrown product of the city's slums, is accused of date-raping the daughter of a pillar of the white establishment, upscale black lawyer Roger White II is asked to represent Fanon and help keep the city's delicate racial balance from blowing sky-high.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 742 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux; 1st edition (1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374270325
• ISBN-13: 978-0374270322
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.1 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (918 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #565,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Conrad Hensley, Conrad Hensley, Conrad Hensley!, November 16, 2001

By 

"ecamg" (Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Man in Full (Mass Market Paperback)

Though I haven't had time to read all 805 previous reviews, my brief survey of them alerted me to the surprising fact that most readers took Charlie Croker, the big Atlanta businessman, to be the protagonist of this book. And if you think that, then no wonder if you're not satisfied with the story! Perhaps, in some barebones technical literary sense, Charlie Croker is the main character of the book. He is introduced on the first page; he gets more column inches, or whatever the equivalent is in book format; he is rich, powerful, important, and a large part of the storyline revolves around the changes in his fortune and the way he copes with them, or fails to. But if you let those things fool you into thinking that A Man in Full is primarily "about" Charlie Croker, then you have not only missed the whole point of the story, but made yourself an example of the very commentary Wolfe is trying to drive home.

The true protagonist - or I should better say, the hero (and most certainly the referent of the title) - of this book is Conrad Hensley, the underdog family man who works in one of Croker's frozen food warehouses, undergoes a long series of unlikely adventures, and accidentally discovers the ancient Stoic religion, which becomes his salvation. The whole point of Stoicism is that it doesn't matter who you are socially, what you have, or what people think of you. All that really matters is what you alone can control: your own emotional/mental/spiritual state. Happiness lies in not letting yourself be controlled by externals. Let go of your attachments to them - accept that they are beyond your control - and nothing can touch you. This is what it means to be a true man, and in the book it is Conrad, not Croker, who achieves this ideal. Croker and the whole Atlanta scene are just there for contrast (false power and glory vs. Conrad's true greatness), to provide an arena for Wolfe to make some of his secondary points about the failings of our society, and as an endpoint for the karma (for lack of a better word) which Conrad achieves by taking his spiritual fate into his own hands under the guidance of Epictetus and Zeus.

Towards the end of the book, Wolfe evens points this out, to make sure you can't miss it. Two of the other characters are reading a newspaper story about Croker's equanimity in the face of his creditors, under Conrad's guidance, invoking the protection of Zeus. Conrad, his home health aide, is briefly mentioned in the story. The characters shake their heads at how an impressionable young man could be taken in by Croker's crazy new beliefs; they're unable to imagine that the humble nobody, rather than the mover and shaker, could be the instigator of anything that creative and unusual. If you are criticizing A Man in Full because it's not a very good story about Charlie Croker, et al., you are making the same mistake - even after Wolfe drew it out for you like that at the end of the book! Perhaps a small part of this misunderstanding can be laid at Wolfe's feet: maybe he drew the Atlanta high society a little TOO larger than life, with a little too much florid detail. Maybe. Or maybe what he's trying to criticize is, sadly, too deeply engrained in our collective consciousness to be undermined by even such a great work of art as this.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wolfe's look at high society in Atlanta, May 31, 2006

By 

Bill Garrison (Oklahoma City, OK USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Man in Full (Paperback)

Tom Wolfe is praised as a brilliant social novelist and I don't read enough of that type of novel to comment on the success of A Man in Full. I have read Bonfire of the Vanities and now this book, and I found them both to be quite enjoyable. A Man in Full is similar to Bonfire with sprawling chapters full of thoughts and descriptions of the main characters. This book is set in Atlanta, where Charlie Croker is an aging real estate developer and former football star. Croker's financial empire is on the verge of collapse and his personal life isn't going to well either.

As with Bonfire, Wolfe writes about the polically connected, race politics and the very wealthy. Charlie Croker and friends judge others based on the amount of money they have and the material possessions they own. Using this criteria to judge others is obviously foolish to all except the most materialistic. Except for Conrad Hensley, the Croker employee arrested for assault, the poorest main character is a banker named Peepgas who has a Harvard MBA and makes $120,000 a year. Needless to say, the social arena Wolfe writes about is above that of most readers. That doesn't mean the book isn't entertaining. I enjoyed all of the characters and their interaction.

When an all-American African American football player at Georgia Tech is suspected of rape, racial tension threatens to destroy Atlanta. Croker is about to lose all his possessions to his creditors and his sexy wife half his age isn't too thrilled about it. Roger White is the black lawyer called on by the black mayor to see if he can get the crusty old Croker to speak out. Conrad Hensley is the Croker employee who is fired then thrown in jail. All the plots slowly converge. This book isn't about action, its about characters. I give this book 4 stars because it was a satisfying journey with some enjoyable characters. I was frustrated a few times by how what was important in life was so obvious yet Charlie Croker never did quite get it. His good ole boy attitude was amusing at times but amazingly ridiculous at others. It was sometimes appalling how attached he was to appearances and his possessions.

About halfway through the book, I browsed some reviews on Amazon. A few said they were terribly disappointed in an ending that felt tacked on and that there wasn't any resolution to the plot or to some of the characters. I disagree. The book ends by resolving the point that the entire book led up too. We are given a few sentences about the fate of some of the other characters. For Wolfe to write entire chapters about everyone else would have taken another 200 pages. The ending is not disappointing and you won't be let down. Every loose end might not get the attention you think it deserves, but I give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt and accept this as the story he wanted to tell.

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Where's the rest of the book?, January 18, 2000

By 

James Burke (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Man in Full (Hardcover)

Reading this novel is like spending three incredible days on a challenging, technical mountain climb -- only to fall off a cliff 10 feet below the summit.

Where is the last half of this book? Did Wolfe lose interest? Did the publishers balk at a 1,500-page novel? Did the printers forget to bind the final five chapters? For an author who spends 15 pages describing in excruciating detail two horses breeding to end this complex novel with a three page "conclusion," "Uh... and everything worked out for everyone and life was good. The end." is simply baffling. This novel ends with more loose ends than your granny's shawl.

That said, the journey to this unfortunate end was an enjoyable one -- I couldn't put the book down. Sure, the characters may have been a bit cliched and two-dimensional, but they were quite entertaining and, like it or not, probably a lot closer to reality than most of us would care to admit.

A few quibbles: While he tried valiantly, Mr. Wolfe is obviously not in touch with youth culture, and his attempts at prison dialogue and "rap" lyrics were often downright excruciating. A rapper named Doctor Rammer Doc Doc? Pu-lease! And if I heard the term "peel yo cap," "jookin'" or worse, "shanks akimbo," one more time, this thing would been forced down the shredder post-haste.

All in all, a compelling, entertaining and detailed look at contemporary American society and the male animal with a criminally terse conclusion.