Customer Reviews

A Man in Full

5 star:		(276)
4 star:		(225)
3 star:		(167)
2 star:		(122)
1 star:		(128)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I loved reading many of the other reviews for this book. There is such a great variety of strong feeling that I can only hope it was what Wolfe was after. He certainly got under a lot of people's skin. The principle objections to this book, that the ending is weak and the story is too long and meandering, while both being true, don't really undermine its great strengths - wonderful writing, larger than life (though 'real') characters and a plot that not only highlights numerous real social issues but shows how they tend to rub up against one another in unexpected ways. In other words, there is a messiness to even the thematic aspects of the book that seems to be intentional and true to life.

Wolfe can't help but exaggerate. That is what satirists do. Yet those who complain that the characters aren't real or are stereotypes seem to really mean that they don't like these people; 'real' people would be, I guess, someone they could identify with. Yet, if Wolfe had chosen Donald Trump or Ross Perot as his hero, could his description be any more 'believeable' or less stereotypic than his portrayal of Charlie Croker? Seems to me that the rich complexity of ego, selfishness and lack of self awareness that come to the fore in his characters (including those in Bonfire) is a very human, very common and very real thing. We are all unbelieveable stereotypes to some, but that doesn't make us less real.

And I especially liked the reviewer who starts his review by saying 'Too many words.' This is so like the scene in 'Amadeus' when the King says to Mozart that his compositions have 'too many notes.' For those of us who love the bite and flash of Wolfe's writing, there can never be too many words, even when they don't add up to the full measure that Wolfe is striving for.

Okay, the ending stinks, most agree and granted, there is some repetition to the language. And the plot contrivances that propel Conrad into Charlie Croaker's life are beyond absurd. (Truly, the Conrad character should have been cut altogether and used for another book.)

BUT...there is a power AND a sensitivity to this book that is rarely seen these days. Power, as in the mating scene between two one-ton beasts, played out before horrified, spellbound guests as post-dinner entertainment...heart-pumping and hilarious! Then the limo ride with the mayor; you can almost FEEL the social downhill cruise from the pristine lawns of Buckhead to the grim, crackhead existence of Southeast Atlanta. Sensitivity, as in the treatment of Peepgass or Wiz, whose world-class educations can't mask their lacking The Right Stuff. Or of the black professional dilemma; i.e., aspiring to success (before whites) while trying not to alienate oneself from the poverty-stricken inner city. (As a black man, I have never encountered a white person who was remotely interested in the subject, never mind one who captured its subtleties so deftly.)

Southerners who complain about TW's Southerner treatment should refrain from being so sensitive. I have seen many remarks indicating the characters are caricatures, but I can tell you, as a Yankee, every time I travel to Georgia/Alabama, I run smack into redneck yahoos and blonde bimbos just like these. And each time they travel to the northeast, I'm sure they run into uptight, smug, sumbitches just like me. The differences between us are merely differences; they're what give life-and books-color and character. Wolfe's writing forces you to look in the mirror (honestly) and see yourself as others see you.

So enjoy A Man in Full, despite its obvious shortcomings. The 80% right overwhelms the 20% wrong.

This novel addresses the question of modern manhood; specifically it addresses the question of how to be a man in the modern/postmodern world. Wolfe recognizes that the erosion of traditional gender, societal, and familial roles over the past century has left a vacuum of purpose in the lives of modern individuals. They can no longer look to religion, tradition, or culture to direct their decisions or to refine their character. So where can a modern man turn for advice on how to live? In desperation the characters in A Man in Full turn to the past and discover that the quest for purpose may not be a modern problem, and that the troublesome solution may have always been within their grasp.

This novel shows a different side to Tom Wolfe in that several of the characters are actually likeable. Wolfe has a reputation for poking fun at everything and everyone, but in A Man in Full the three main characters, as flawed as they are, evoke sympathy and understanding from the reader. Conrad's car trouble episode, for example, is the best representation of the frustrations of working poverty that I have ever read. As always Wolfe exhibits his signature style of defining modern American culture in great documentary detail, from the grandiose to the miniscule, with searing insight. The novel tends to be over-documentary at times which slows down the narrative, and the ending seems clipped and a bit unnatural. Overall, though, this novel is an instant classic, and proves that Wolfe is the best writer of his generation. A.

Reviews seem to miss the point of this book, which is, in the aggregate, the male characters in this work and their core characteristics represent "A Man in Full." Name the male attribute and it is here: competitiveness, honor, dishonor, preening self-importance, flawed heroism, tragedy and fall from grace, the desire to be remembered, dominance, aggression, the search for philosophical truth, moral courage, self-doubt, fear of aging, feebleness and death, the resilience of youth, physical strength and weakness, stature and the fear of losing it, social and business gamesmanship and one-upsmanship, leadership, cowardice, guilt, political machination, arrogance, war-like-behavior, chest-beating machismo, ego, testosterone-driven desire, redemption, even luck ... all of it is here. This work is more a sprawling, often self-indulgent exercise in exploration of what makes a man, specifically the American male, than it is a novel with a focused plot, orderly character development and exposition. Hence the oddly unsatisfying, abbreviated ending, as if Mr. Wolfe ran out of avenues of maleness to explore and simply ended it.

I'm sure that by now everyone is aware of the basic story of A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe's eleven-years-in-the-making, heart-surgery and-depression-interrupted, follow up to his great novel of the 80's, Bonfire of the Vanities. Charlie Croker is a 60 year old, good old boy, developer in Atlanta. A former star Georgia Tech halfback, his empire includes a game ranch, a frozen foods business and a white elephant of an office building that is bleeding him dry. Judging his success purely by the accouterments, he appears to be doing okay, with a hottie trophy wife, a Gulf Stream 5, palatial houses, etc. But his bankers smell blood in the water, one of them (Raymond Peepgass) has even secretly put together a syndicate to take over the office building at cut rate, and Charlie has to lay off some workers at the food business, including young Conrad Hensley, just to free up cash and buy some time. Meanwhile, Georgia Tech's new star halfback, Fareek Fanon, is being accused of raping the daughter of one of Charlie's wealthy society cronies. Up and coming black attorney Roger White II (Roger Too White) has been called in to handle the defense and he offers Charlie a deal: speak out in support of Fareek at a press conference orchestrated by the mayor, and they'll get the bank to back off. As Charlie wrestles with this decision, Conrad works his way across the country, converting to Stoicism in the process. Their paths all meet when Conrad is assigned to Charlie as a physical therapist after knee surgery and shares the tenets of Stoicism with him. With the press conference looming Charlie must decide whether to go along with Roger's plan, by praising Fareek, and save his empire and position in society or be true to himself, at the risk of losing everything and possibly causing race riots in Atlanta, and tell the truth, that Fareek, like many athletes, is shallow, self-centered, pampered and arrogant.

Of course, interspersed with this basic narrative, Wolfe provides the myriad details, learned expositions, social observations and zeitgeist probings for which he is justly famous. These elements of the novel, if not quite up to the level of his best work (Radical Chic, Bauhaus to Our House, The Right Stuff and Bonfire), are still very funny, extremely insightful and wildly ambitious. He really just blows the doors off of most other novelists, simply by being willing to attempt such a massive portrait of America.

If you just take that set up, it looks like this is merely an updating of Bonfire--rich guy's world collapsing, racial tension, etc.. But the real risk taking, the nearly masochistic reach that Wolfe makes here, is in his portrayal of Conrad Hensley. For over thirty years, Wolfe has been a master of the social satire. He has basically made a career out of pricking the gonfalon bubbles of America's most ostentatious and self-important cultural elites. But once in a great while one of his subjects has managed to pierce the ironic veil and make him stumble. The two who spring to mind most readily are the race car driver Junior Johnson (read his profile "The Last American Hero") and Chuck Yeager (read Orrin's review of The Right Stuff). Both of these men penetrated Wolfe's ironic detachment and he ended up portraying them as genuine unalloyed American heroes. Now it's perfectly understandable that this point was lost in his pretty substantial corpus of work, but with Conrad it becomes clear what was going on all along; they are all Men in Full.

When Conrad is in prison and has just discovered the teachings of Epictetus and the other Stoics, he finds himself in a situation that clearly portends his own rape and asks:

What would Epictetus have done with this bunch? What could he have done? How could you apply his lessons two thousand years later, in this grimy gray pod, this pigsty full of beasts who grunted about motherf***in' this and motherf***in' that and turning boys into B-cats and jookin' punks? And yet...were they really any worse than Nero and his Imperial Guard? Epictetus spoke to him--from half a world and two thousand years away! The answer was somewhere in these pages! What little bit Conrad had learned about philosophy at Mount Diablo had seemed to concern people who were free and whose main problem was to choose from among life's infinite possibilities. Only Epictetus began with the assumption that life is hard, brutal, punishing, narrow, and confining, a deadly business, and that fairness and unfairness are beside the point. Only Epictetus, so far as Conrad knew, was a philosopher who had been stripped of everything, imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, threatened with death. And only Epictetus had looked his tormenters in the eye and said, "You do what you have to do, and I will do what I have to do, which is live and die like a man." And he had prevailed.

There in a nutshell is what Wolfe has been looking for throughout his decades long journey through the American landscape--modern successors to Epictetus, men who live and die like men, who simply do the right thing. He had found two such men in Yeager and Johnson and now, for the first time, he has created a fictional character in their image. And Conrad becomes the vehicle through which Wolfe demonstrates that there is still a tiny flame of genuine decency burning within modern man.

This is the point at which the book becomes truly remarkable. Because Tom Wolfe--68, ill, depressed, snide, old Tom Wolfe--allows Charlie Croker to redeem himself. What a symbol of hope the author holds out to us. Charlie Croker who has been as caught up in the games and role playing of our vacuous modern world as any of the characters, real or fictional, that Wolfe has ever described, finds it within himself to become a man in full, to do the right thing, to live like a man. It turns out that Wolfe is a romantic at heart. His long career attacking pretense is suddenly cast in a different light. It turns out he's been trying to get us to strip away our materialist, politically correct, corporatist, conformist, opportunistic outer selves and become Stoics. Many of the critics refer to this book as Wolfe's most humane work and it is to this realization that they are unknowingly referring. After thirty some odd years of poking fun at people, we find out that he's trying to save their souls.

Of course, all of this is an invitation to ridicule. It's bad enough if you are merely a brilliant conservative. Worse still to be one of the great journalists of all time, and a conservative. Much worse to be a great novelist, and a conservative. But now, here comes the worst blow of all; you just can't be a brilliant journalist/novelist who's a compassionate conservative; you overload the circuits. But at the end of the day that is what we are left with. Radical Chic and Right Stuff established him as a first rate journalist. Bonfire and Man in Full elevate him to the first rank of novelists. If his politics weren't galling enough before, here he is juxtaposing an AID's benefit with a prison rape and calling on us to return to a moral philosophy that predates (and influenced) Christ. And here, in the twilight of his career, it becomes obvious that the Conrad Hensleys and the human possibilities of a Charlie Croker are central to his vision of man. No wonder the reviews are so wildly contradictory and even self-contradictory. The left wing establishment does not even seem to understand what Wolfe has set out to do, but what they do understand, they clearly don't like.

Take a look at what the critics take issue with in his work. Wolfe's critics dislike his politics. Well of course they do, his moral politics are fundamentally two millenia old and profoundly conservative. They say his female characters are weak. Of course they are; he's uninterested in women. All of his work turns out to be an attempt to understand modern men. They say he only presents characters' surface personae, not their inner beings. That's his point; we've abandoned our inner beings, our natural selves, and we live the lives we project to people. The essence of the Wolfe critique--from Radical Chic, to the Apollo program, to modern art--is that modern man is hollow. Like C.S. Lewis' "men without chests", they lack a moral core and so every passing fade or fancy is manifested in their outer beings. Lacking any internal compass for moral guidance, they follow the herd like lemmings. Are gay rights popular? Fine, I'm pro gay! Indian rights are big? I feel Native American pain! Those paint splatter things that my two year old could do are worth $5 million? Jackson Pollack is a genius! You tell me what attitude is at 50% in the polls and that's how I feel. Throughout his career, Wolfe has been throwing these forms of political correctness back in the faces of the literatti and the glitteratti. So, yes, each of these criticisms is absolutely accurate. In fact, they are the point of his writing. The critics just happen to have, typically, missed the point. And so, instead of giving A

I'm surprised at several of the amazon reviews that seem to have taken reading this book as if it were a chore. Yes, it's long, but I, for one, found it strangely absorbing.

Do not be afraid of long books. Wolfe engages in an impressive cast of characters and takes time to develop many of them. His narrative flow is superb. I enjoyed not only the plot and the characters, but the writing style as well. The author has a certain way with the English language that is captivating, and concepts like "boys with breasts" (aka today's skin-n-bones models), "saddlebags" and "hubba ho" can be both though-provoking and laugh-out-loud funny. Wolfe has a unique sense of humor, considering he routinely does things off-beat like naming a black maid "Auntie Bella" (antebellum?).

Wolfe seems to love his characters (even the unsympathetic ones) and takes readers along for a wild ride with characters like Roger Too White (a "beige brother" lawyer and Morehouse grad), Serena Crocker (a money-chasing second wife), Martha Crocker (a bitter first wife), Raymond Peepgrass (a money-chasing bank geek after the first wife), and Conrad Hensley (a bitter blue-collar worker reborn in prison). The antihero main character, however, will blow you away. Charlie Crocker is as much tall tale as real man. A real-estate giant in Atlanta, as well as an ex-football great, Charlie teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and personal ruin. At times like watching a train wreck, one never knows exactly what to think of Charlie -- he can be both sympathetic and unsympathetic to the extreme.

Wolfe seems to have a "take it or leave it" quirkiness that will engage some readers to the fullest and turn off others completely. Yes, you might have to sift through some of the author's annoying habits, like describing IN GREAT DETAIL every item of clothing every character is wearing at any given moment, but the experience of reading this book on the whole was very satisfying. I was left frustrated at the end, in fact, because I had no one to discuss the book with afterward. It really leaves a residue on the reader and begs to be thought of long after the last page has been turned.

Tom Wolfe has delivered an excellent, quality work of fiction in almost every sense. His prose is magnificent, with sweeping descriptions picking up details the same way a skilled cinematographer gets both the forest and all the trees into the frame. His characters ring true at every turn. Their actions are never inconsistent. He has skillfully woven the intricate subplots to bring them all together at an ultimate moment. My only criticism of Mr. Wolfe's work has to do with the ending of the book. I often judge a good reads final merits on how complete I feel the story is after I close the back cover. Do I give out a big sigh and say to myself, "Yup. That did it." Unfortunately, with this book I was left with a feeling that Mr. Wolfe hurried up his ending so he could make it to print in time for some deadline, and with nagging questions. Most of my questions concerned the fate of Conrad, whom I saw as the true protagonist in the work. The epilogue was an extremely foreshortened denoument and conclusion to an otherwise extremetly well thought out drama. Other than that one relatively minor disappointment, I have thoroughly enjoyed the read, and found it well worth the money spent.