Look out, America! Here comes Tom Wolfe's new novel -- a million copies in
print! A full 742 pages! Eleven years in the writing! Nominated for the
National Book Award before publication! It's a blockbuster, a
doorstopper, a lollapalooza set in the Atlanta of the Old South and the new
black South, the Olympics and Freaknik. And it could have been even bigger.
Only recently did Wolfe decide he didn't have "to write the biggest book in
the world," as he told Time's Paul Gray. He discarded "bales" of
manuscripts -- unused pages on Japan, TV news, insurance sales.
Some fans of Wolfe's previous bestsellers may be sorry, but I, for one, am
grateful. "A Man in Full" is already a supersize swig of literary
testosterone, Wolfe's exhaustive and exhausting manifesto of masculinity at
the millennium. It has subplots about real estate wheeler-dealers,
stressed-out bankers, blue-blooded African-American politicians with
fabulous suits and priceless collections of Yoruba art, illegal Asian
immigrants, superfluous discarded wives and blue-collar workers, but the
question at the heart of the novel is what makes a man a real man, a man's
man, a man in full. Like his hero Charlie Croker, Wolfe lets us know he has
"masculinity to burn." He sorts out the "true Male Animals" from the
passive wimps. His preferred men look like bulls or lions, with rippling
muscles, thick necks and huge forearms. Black or white, rich or poor, they
are combat-ready, eager to turn every business transaction, social
occasion and sporting event into a struggle for male conquest. Readers
should not be slow to get the repellent point.
But Wolfe has more than machismo up his sleeve. Since the '80s, he has been
anticipating a Third Great Awakening, an American religious movement born
out of luxury, narcissism and greed. In 1995, Wolfe was predicting a
spiritual revival for the millennium. The '90s, he argued, were the decade
of moral fever rather than money fever. In August 1996, Wolfe had a
quintuple heart bypass operation, followed by a prolonged depression from
which he was rescued by Dr. Paul McHugh, psychiatrist in chief of the Johns
Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and the main dedicatee of "A Man in Full."
His survey of decadent end-of-the-century American masculinity is also a quest
for religious transcendence, pursued through a trio of larger-than-life
protagonists.
Charlie Croker is a fabulously rich, 60-year-old real estate developer with
a gorgeous 28-year-old trophy wife. He likes to feel "earthy, Down Home,
elemental, which is to say, he was no longer merely a real estate
developer, he was ... a man." He wrestles rattlesnakes with his bare hands.
He takes his weekend guests to the breeding barn to watch a stallion, penis
like a "long, dark evil leather knout," mount a mare in heat. Charlie
follows up this Jamesian scene of delicate indirection with a little
homophobic homily: "People can talk about gay rats till they're blue in the
face ... But there's the heart of it ... That's what it all boils down to
at the end, the male and the female, and that's it."
Charlie also struts his stuff in the opening chapter, a quail hunt at
Turpmtine, his costly 29,000-acre Georgia plantation, kept going by black
"retainers" for the fall shooting season. But the scene -- which resembles
a set piece in the traditional English novel where aristocrats still do go
off to the country to kill birds -- rings false and eccentric in the
American setting. (Walter Kirn, reviewing the novel in New York magazine,
complains that "no veteran bird hunter ... would go after quail with
buckshot." Talk about one-upmanship.)
Being a full man in macho white Atlanta includes making fun of the AIDS
Ball ("Let's Riff for Syph!"). Wolfe juxtaposes satiric scenes of a
Mapplethorpish museum opening featuring huge murals of homoerotic prison
scenes with a brutal prison rape. Charlie slips up and calls a Jewish
client, Herb Richman, "Hebe." He regards women older than 30 as cows with
"sagging hides," and his ex-wife Martha "has shoulders like a middle
linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys ... and how often could you get aroused
by a forty-some-year-old woman with that much beef in her neck and
shoulders and her upper back?" Such thoughts, Charlie tells himself, are
"the way the male animal was constituted." Male animals are also
constituted to ignore their children, especially if they are female or
effeminate, like his sensitive son Wally. At the end of the novel,
Charlie's baby daughter Kingsley, by his second wife, actually seems to
have vanished, and good riddance to a "pale little creature."
Nevertheless, the reader (presumably male) is expected to identify with and
care about Charlie, who is in a lot of trouble. He owes a bundle to the
bank, and he is getting scared -- of illness, aging, impotence and failure.
Early on, he meets his match in a sadistic financial grilling called a
"workout session" at PlannersBanc, where the bank's "saddlebag team"
(nicknamed for the shape of the sweat they produce on the victim's shirt)
makes him suffer, stammer and promise to sell his assets. Wolfe uses
metaphors of Marine boot camp for the scene, in which the bank's chief
"drill instructor" flaunts suspenders with a skull-and-crossbones motif.
You can almost see this showdown on the big screen, but realistically
speaking, it seems crude and sensationalized. Why would the bank's officers
go to such extremes to humiliate and insult a big player, even one who owes
them millions, in a volatile business where everyone knows that by next
week the whipped dog may be eating your sorry ass?
The chapters about black Atlanta are less frenzied and much better; John
Updike in the New Yorker even suggests that Wolfe is writing a "Great Black
Novel." Wolfe has a great ear for accent, dialect, idiolect and dialogue,
and offers an ambitiously detailed cross-section of the new black South
through the eyes of the elegant Roger "Too" White -- a fastidious and
cultivated lawyer defending a football star accused of rape -- and his
friends, including the black mayor. There is a high-spirited chapter about
Freaknik, the black college festival held in Atlanta, that recalls Wolfe's
best journalism.
But Wolfe is on completely new and strange turf with his third man, young
Conrad Hensley, a "straightforward struggler" who emerges as the book's
spiritual center and savior. Conrad is laid off his job in the California
freezer warehouse of Croker Foods when Charlie has to sell it, and through
various mishaps ends up in the Alameda County Jail. His fellow workers and
prisoners are lowlifes and brutes who like boom-box rap or violent country
metal and admire groups like the Child Abusers singing "Eat Shit," "Pus
Casserole" or "Crash 'n Burn."
Conrad, however, is made for higher things. In prison, he begins to think
about his soul, starts reading the Stoic philosophers and becomes entranced
by the defiance of Epictetus, who had also spent time in prison as a young
man. "Only Epictetus understood why Conrad Hensley had refused to accept a
plea bargain! Only Epictetus understood why he had refused to lower himself
just a rung or two, demean himself just a little bit, dishonour himself
just a touch." Inspired by Epictetus, aspiring to be touched by Zeus,
Conrad stays cool, defends himself against the alpha-male prison rapist,
Rotto, and escapes during a convenient earthquake. Eventually, working as a
male nurse, he winds up taking care of Charlie and teaching him the Stoic
way: "If you say to a Stoic, 'Look, you do what I tell you or I'll kill
you,' he'll look you in the eye and say, 'You do what you have to do, and
I'll do what I have to do -- and when did I ever tell you I was immortal?'"
This credo gets to Charlie Croker and helps him make a surprising
conversion: "Charlie felt serene. He no longer felt pain in his knee ... He
felt tranquil and ... light. His feet only just barely touched the marble
and the earth below. He felt as if he could run a hundred yards just the
way he had forty years ago. Wouldn't that amaze them all! He had
shed all the shabby baggage of this life. He had become a vessel of the
Divine." In the name of this newfound divinity, he renounces his worldly
goods.
This conclusion seems to have touched the hearts of many of Wolfe's
reviewers, who praise the novel's warmth, humanity and depth. But in fact,
Stoicism seems to pay off for all its disciples, who are handsomely
rewarded for their so-called renunciations. Charlie gives up real estate
and becomes a full-time celebrity evangelist for Stoicism, with a TV
syndication deal. Conrad is paroled instead of sent back to jail when he
nobly turns himself in. In Wolfe's version of Stoicism, pity is a wasted
emotion, since everyone is responsible for his own bad luck. Moreover, the
ethical enlightenment of Stoicism doesn't require any awkward
self-sacrifice or emotional compromises and efforts. Charlie doesn't go
back to his first wife, or try to make a real marriage with his second, or
even try to be a decent father to his children. Like the classic American
hero, he hits the road alone and unencumbered. The young hero of Anne
Tyler's novel "Saint Maybe," by contrast, causes his brother's death, and
is advised by the pastor of her imaginary "Church of the Second Chance" to
drop out of college and take responsibility for raising his brother's
children. Charlie's serenity comes from the rejuvenating qualities of
shedding the "shabby baggage" of marriage and paternity.
Stoicism is actually a stark philosophy, which insists that everyone has
the choice of committing suicide when life is overwhelming, and thus can
never be enslaved. But Wolfe's heroes use Stoicism to liberate themselves
from convention, responsibility and restraint in the name of "honor" and
"manhood." Charlie's conversion barely calls into question the rampant and
ruthless capitalism that has run his life. In Wolfe's hands, Stoicism is
truly the religion of the entrepreneur, a self-help program for those who
swim with the sharks.
Maybe a million aspiring Charlie Crokers will buy this book, but somehow I
doubt it. They'll wait for the movie. And next time, Wolfe warns us, he
wants to write a novel about universities. "The topic sounds dull," he told
Paul Gray, "but I think there are plenty of madcap episodes going on in
that field that might be fun to write about." I can already imagine the
scene where the sadistic department chair tells the cocky young prof that
he won't get tenure: the workout. But the stakes will be a lot smaller, and
that might not be a bad thing.
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