A Man in Full

SITTING BEFORE before Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, a 700-page volume, is like facing a sumptuous feast. Do you plunge in devouring each dish, always in eager anticipation of the next mouthful? Or, do you proceed slowly and deliberately, savoring the taste, pleasant aroma, and delightful texture of each bite? The former course will likely lead to literary indigestion, the latter to long-term sustenance.

Like Charles Dickens, Wolf is a chronicler of his time, capturing the sense of an era by careful and observant description of physical details. Great and important literature defines a period more completely than any arid historical account could ever accomplish. The popular perception of the harshness of nineteenth-century London comes from passages in Dickens' Hard Times or Oliver Twist. Johns Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath defines our understanding of rural poverty during the Great Depression. Wolfe's work reach these heights.

Wolfe has made a career habit of observing contemporary America. Whether it's the "radical chic" of wealthy America's flirtation with Left-wing revolutionaries in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, or the "masters of the universe" on Wall Street who drove the exuberance of the 1980s in the Bonfire of the Vanities, or the Right Stuff of the Mercury astronauts, Wolfe's vocabulary has intruded into the vernacular.

The poetic cadences of Wolfe's prose do not just capture the senses but overwhelm them. Consider how his attention to small details place the reader in a stall with a mare in a passage from A Man in Full.

"All at once, as if on cue, a great shaft of sunlight, vibrating with dust particles, streamed down from one of the little windows and lit up the dirt floor like a stage. There spotlit by the sunbeam, was a narrow wooden enclosure with low walls, a type of stall known as a stock; and in the stock stood a large pale-bay mare. The warm, heavy, gumbo smell of horseflesh filled the place, suffused every rhinal cavity, permeated your very gizzard."

The "man in full" is Charles Crocker, an ambitious Atlanta real estate developer whose bullish arrogance has created an empire now edging toward implosion under pressure of an enormous debt load. Crocker is a metaphor for American hubris defined by material acquisition.

Wolfe leads us through the political and social corridors of power in racially precarious Atlanta, as Crocker is eventually faced with a self-defining decision. Just as ravenous creditors are closing in on Crocker, he is offered a choice. Crocker can suffer the humiliation of bankruptcy and lose honor among his peers. Or, Crocker, a former sports star at Georgia Tech, can publicly speak on behalf of Fareek Fannon, a self-important and thoroughly despicable Georgia Tech All-American halfback, who may have sexually assaulted the daughter of a friend. Lose the honor conferred by wealth or betray a friend, who would likely think less of him if he lost his wealth.

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