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by: Tom Wolfe
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780374270322
ISBN: 0374270325
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 742
Publication Date: November 12, 1998
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 221149
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble.A decade ago, The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. This time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist.
Amazon.com Review:
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 poster boy, minimalism is a wash, not to mention a failure of nerve. The real mission of the American writer is to produce fat novels of social observation--the sort of thing Balzac would be dishing up if he had made it into the Viagra 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 twentieth 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 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 plantation, 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
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Wolfe at his best!
I've read this book many times - it's a masterpiece in every sense of the word, like all of Wolfe's other novels. No other writer that I can think of makes his characters *come to life* the way Wolfe does! I feel like I KNOW the men he's talking about. Like David Mamet, Wolfe's writing always puts masculinity and macho power-jockeying front and center...adapting this mentality to the current day, where wars are fought "not by knights on the battlefield, but by men in offices" to paraphrase Wolfe ... Read More
Rating: - It's Atlanta, Georgia, but not Rhett Butler's and Scarlett O'Hara's
Atlanta. It's about the new Atlanta and a pompous white/cracker plantation owner and land developer, Charlie Croker. His trophy 28-year-old wife and his hired "negroes" complete his picture of successful businessman. But, something has happened to Charlie along the way to success - he's gone broke and the bankers are dogging him demanding payment on his loans.
It's also about the new black Atlanta with its African themed Mayor's office, its light-skinned lawyer who dresses like a British ... Read More
Rating: - Atlanta Burns Again
It took Tom Wolfe more than decade to finally publish his second novel. Using the same journalistic skills which made him famous, A MAN IN FULL sees Wolfe turning his keen eye and withering criticism south, to Atlanta, where we first meet Charlie Croker. One time college football star, now a middle aged businessman whose spectacular success has just hit the brick wall real, real hard. Too much to lose, he finds himself with few options to get himself out of the hole he has dug.
One option, ... Read More
Rating: - Stoics rule
I'm reading A Man in Full for maybe the fifth time and it is great. First, get ahold of the hardcover edition. This book is too good to struggle through in the form of a fat, misshapen paperback with tiny type. You will want to own this book and keep it.
Begin with chapter IX, The Superfluous Woman. Then go to Chapter I, Chocolate Mecca, and what the heck, Chapter V, The Suicidal Freezer Unit. Those three terrific chapters could stand as short stories.
Now that you know you are ... Read More
Rating:  - Two Novels: One Big, One Small
When I first penned this review, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full was the best selling book in the country, a huge success critically and commercially, while Philip K. Dick's Humpty Dumpty in Oakland was not published during his lifetime, and has been little noticed since (though a new paperback edition is coming to Amazon in September '08). Wolfe's is a large book, sprawling, with dozens of characters, while Dick's Oakland book is small in scope. Yet the connection is there: both books contain thematic elements ... Read More
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