Monday, Nov. 02, 1998

Books: Tom Wolfe: A Man In Full

By Paul Gray

The megayield critical and commercial success of The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987 made Tom Wolfe a rich and very gratified author indeed. That big, boisterous novel, his first, proved a point that he had been arguing, much to the annoyance of literary folks, for years: American fiction could still portray the hectic complexities of contemporary social life, could still capture the textures and rhythms of a seething modern city, if novelists would just leave their desks, maybe take a sabbatical from their professorships in creative writing and go out and report on the fabulous stuff taking place all around them. But, Wolfe complained, most post-'60s U.S. novelists had simply abandoned the passing scene in favor of introspection or self-conscious artifice. They had ceded public reality to journalists, of whom Wolfe was a notable example (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff) before he invaded the House of Fiction and noisily threw open the windows.

After Bonfire, though, came the inevitable question. What next? Topping his first novel would be hard, the risk of failure and I-told-you-so reviews high. But Wolfe found the challenge irresistible. "I was 57," he says, "and I thought the eight or nine years I'd spent on Bonfire had taught me what not to do the second time. So, I proceeded to make every blunder a beginning writer could stumble into."

As he lists them, it becomes clear why readers have had to wait 11 years for A Man in Full (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 742 pages; $28.95) and how demanding the self-imposed Wolfe regimen of putting that book together actually was. "First, I tried to take the easy way out by setting most of the new novel in Manhattan, the same locale I'd used in Bonfire. I didn't realize until 1995 that this approach wasn't working and that I was repeating myself. Second, I always recommend to people who ask me for helpful hints on writing that they start with an outline. Naturally, I didn't take my own advice and do an outline until I was years into this project.

"A third mistake," he adds, "was my feeling that the new book had to raise the stakes and include more than Bonfire, that I was obligated to write the biggest book in the world. So I spent 10 very expensive days in Japan looking for some way to get that country into the plot. And I also tried to work in some sort of television-news element and the life of an unsuccessful artist and the dealings of an unctuous insurance salesman, all of which required a lot of research and reporting and proved to be dead ends. I practically have bales of discarded manuscripts."

All these delays caused another problem, one stemming directly from Wolfe's determination to make his novels factually accurate. "I always intended to set this book in the present," he says, "but I took so long writing it that the present kept changing."

What remained constant in Wolfe's mind throughout this creative marathon was a tour two Atlanta friends had given him back in 1989 of the plantations of southwest Georgia, immense tracts of property, dotted with sumptuous homes and extensive outbuildings, maintained at staggering expense by the superrich for the principal reason of shooting quail in season between Thanksgiving and the end of February. "I look for milieu first," Wolfe says, "the setting of a story before the story itself, and I was astonished at those plantations, their psychological location in the past and the tremendous amount of conspicuous consumption required to maintain them. I thought they would make great material."

A fictional Georgia plantation is, at long last, where A Man in Full begins. The trip readers make from there to the end of the book will store up fuel for literary discussions and debates throughout, and probably beyond, the coming winter. The 1.2 million copies of its first printing, an astounding number for a novel not written by somebody named Clancy or Grisham, are heading toward the stores. And the book has already received a publicity boost that exceeds the power of purse strings: four weeks before the Nov. 12 publication date, A Man in Full was nominated for a 1998 National Book Award.

Those expecting another Bonfire may be disappointed--the new novel is better. It's not quite as glitzy and brash and hilariously in-your-face as its predecessor, but then Atlanta in the late '90s, where most of the action occurs, is a more well-mannered place than New York City was in the '80s. The same bloodlusts--sex, money, status--rage in the New South as they do everywhere else; it just takes a little more digging to find them. Wolfe does, of course, but among all the animal appetites that are slaked or comically thwarted during the novel there appears one new to Wolfe's fiction. For all their affluence, or their pained lack of same, his chief characters hunger for a code of conduct or a framework of beliefs that will make sense of their lives right now, a blink before the millennium. At its heart, A Man in Full is a cliff-hanging morality tale.

The adventure takes off from Turpmtine--the local Georgia pronunciation of the product once derived from the pinetree resin harvested there. The 29,000 acres of this plantation belong to Charlie Croker, 60, a high-stakes Atlanta real estate developer with a second wife 32 years his junior and an arthritic knee, a relic from his days of playing football for Georgia Tech. Among his many earthly possessions, Turpmtine is by far Charlie's most cherished; he sees it as a validation not of his wealth but of something deeper: "You had to be man enough to deserve a quail plantation." In fact, some of Charlie's older servants at Turpmtine remember a song about a local, long-ago legend also named Charlie Croker, and the master loves to hear them sing it. The ditty begins, "Charlie Croker was a man in full/ He had a back like a Jersey Bull."

Unfortunately, our Charlie Croker is also a man in trouble. His latest development, a grandiose tower named Croker Concourse, is undertenanted and hemorrhaging money. He owes PlannersBanc in Atlanta $515 million and an assortment of other lenders $285 million more, and he can't even meet interest on all that debt, never mind repay the principal.

So Charlie is hauled into PlannersBanc for a humiliating session known as a "workout." What follows is probably the most riveting fictional scene ever set in a bank conference room, although the competition is admittedly scarce. From his former status as one of PlannersBanc's most-courted customers, Charlie has fallen to the level of "s___head," an arrogant deadbeat who must be bullied out of his profligate habits and set on the course of fiscal prudence. As a grudging sop to the ravenous bankers, Charlie decrees a 15% cut in the work force of another of his enterprises, Croker Global Food.

Across the continent, in Oakland, Calif., Charlie's decision falls like doom on Conrad Hensley, 23, the married father of two who has a $14-an-hour job on the night shift hauling frozen food out of a Croker Global warehouse to waiting delivery trucks. Conrad is someone new in a Wolfe novel, a totally good person who wants nothing more out of life than to buy a modest condominium for his family and establish a well-ordered, bourgeois existence. After the most riveting fictional scene ever set in a 0[degree]F freezer unit--here the competition is nonexistent--Conrad learns that he has been laid off, a catastrophe that drives him innocently and mistakenly but also inexorably into the vividly described hellhole of the Alameda County jail.

Wolfe's novel is bound by the inevitably intertwining paths of Charlie and Conrad, but that circumference is swollen by a series of related subplots, conveyed through the thoughts of three other characters. Raymond Peepgass, 46, a senior loan officer at PlannersBanc, has an inside view of Charlie's financial mess and thinks he may be able to dip surreptitiously into all that sloshing debt. Then there is Martha Croker, 53, still reeling from the breakup of her nearly 30-year marriage to Charlie. Now that she is no longer seen on the arm of her husband, her old Atlanta friends no longer see her, "a superfluous woman," at all.

The linchpin to all the subplots is Roger White II, 42, an impeccably dressed light-skinned black partner in the venerable Atlanta law firm of Wringer Fleasom & Tick. The nickname he picked up at Morehouse College, Roger Too White, reflected his disdain for all the campus talk about black separatism. But his old Morehouse friend and fraternity brother Wesley Dobbs Jordan is now the mayor of Atlanta. That connection explains why Roger is asked to represent Georgia Tech's All-American running back, Fareek ("the Cannon") Fannon.

The racial turmoil portrayed in Bonfire was up front and confrontational and stomping on the streets. Atlanta, as Wolfe portrays it, handles this problem a lot differently. Fareek is a fairly typical contemporary phenomenon, a loutish, sullen, spoiled athlete wearing diamond ear studs and, Roger observes, "a gold chain so chunky you could have used it to pull an Isuzu pickup out of a red clay ditch." Fareek is also a local Atlanta boy who climbed to fame from a poor black neighborhood. And he has now been accused, though not yet formally charged, of date rape by the daughter of one of Atlanta's most powerful white businessmen, Inman Armholster, who happens to be Charlie Croker's closest friend.

No one in race-conscious Atlanta, except the girl's furious father, wants to see this explosive matter go public. Mayor Jordan tells Roger, "This case has the potential to do more damage to this city than anything since the murder of Martin Luther King or the Rodney King riots, because it gets right down to the core of the white man's fear. Do you see what I'm saying?" Roger sees. But the rumors are out there already; a local Internet gossip sheet is adding new details almost daily. Quickly, the city's white business interests and black leadership huddle and come up with a plan. The only person who can defuse or at least damp down this problem is...Charlie Croker.

Right about here this roller coaster of a novel starts to get really complicated, especially ethically. The proposal Roger White, at Mayor Jordan's behest, brings to Charlie boils down to this: get acquainted with the Cannon, talk over your shared experiences as Georgia Tech football stars, and then appear at a press conference to say that Fareek is a fine young man, charged with no crime, and that everybody should just simmer down.

Why on earth would Charlie do that? Roger explains: "Once you've met with Fareek, you decide whether or not to go ahead with the press conference. If you say yes, then you let us know, and immediately all pressure from PlannersBanc will cease. If you then do your part at the press conference, it will cease for good, and the bank will restructure the loans on the most generous terms imaginable."

Charlie understands what defending Fareek will do to his reputation: "Who could he look in the face after that? Who of all the people he had entertained at Turpmtine would ever come again? On the other hand, if he refused--then suppose he lost Turpmtine, lost everything he had, including his house on Blackland Road--was wiped out! demolished!--the result would be the same, wouldn't it! No one would come to visit him then, either!"

No summary of A Man in Full can do justice to the novel's ethical nuances and hell-bent pacing, its social sweep and intricate interweaving of private and public responsibilities, its electric sense of conveying current events and its knowing portraits of people actually doing their jobs. Who, besides Wolfe, would have thought that banking and real estate transactions could be the stuff of gripping fiction? Who else would have set a scene, the most over-the-top in the whole novel, in the breeding barn at Turpmtine, where Charlie, in a misguided attempt to impress his guests from Atlanta, makes them, male and female alike, witness a tumultuous mating between one of his stallions and a mare? "I attended just such an event in mixed company in south Georgia," Wolfe says, "and I'll never forget seeing that."

The author is seated on a sofa in the 12-room apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side that he shares with Sheila, his wife of 20 years, and their son Tommy, 13. Daughter Alexandra, 18, has flown the nest for her freshman year in college. Wolfe, slender and looking at least a decade shy of his 68 years, wears at home pretty much what he has worn in public since he became a highly visible Manhattan journalist in the '60s: a trademark white suit and vest, a high-necked blue-and-white-striped shirt complemented by a creamy silk necktie.

He speaks very softly, a hint of his native Richmond, Va., still audible in his vowels. "I also spent some time, although not much time, in a zero-degree freezer unit like the one Conrad works in in the novel." Did he actually witness firsthand a "workout" session such as the one Charlie endures at PlannersBanc? "No," he says in the tone of a reporter stymied. "I tried everything, promised to dress like a banker and keep quiet, but I never could get into one. Still, I have five sources for that scene, and I know I'm right."

Being right--accurate--has been important to Wolfe since his earliest days as a New Journalist, when he wrote feature stories so vividly, employing such a wide array of techniques borrowed from fiction that some readers didn't believe they could be true. Jann Wenner, founder, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, opened his magazine's pages to early versions of The Right Stuff, Bonfire and A Man in Full, and is a Wolfe friend and fan. "Many years ago, he used to get knocked for making stuff up," Wenner says. "But in my experience with him, which is 25 years, he's never made anything up, any detail of fact." Wenner believes Wolfe's strenuous pursuit of precise details, both in his journalism and fiction, has produced a major body of work. "If you read it all together as one piece, you would understand the amazing modern crazy quilt and fabric of contemporary America better than [through] any other thing I can imagine seeing or reading or looking at."

But the power of A Man in Full stems not simply from its reportorial accuracy; there is also the extraordinary sympathy Wolfe generates for his characters, particularly Charlie, Conrad and the abandoned Martha. Sympathy was a quality in short supply in much of Wolfe's early journalism, in which he allowed his subjects to embarrass or hang themselves through their meticulously quoted words. Witness Radical Chic, Wolfe's witheringly objective account of a 1970 fund-raising party for the Black Panthers held in the exquisite Manhattan apartment of the composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia, during which the journalist detailed both the revolutionary rhetoric and the passing of hors d'oeuvres. Something of the same take-no-prisoners ethos ruled Bonfire. So what has changed during the past 11 years? Has Wolfe mellowed?

"Well," he says, "I've suffered." Then he laughs. "I prefer to say I've broadened." He talks about his heart attack in August 1996 and of being wheeled into an operating room for quintuple bypass surgery. "I was thinking of A Man in Full on the way in, maybe as a way of focusing on a lesser worry or because of the effects of the Demerol they'd given me." The operation was successful, and Wolfe emerged "euphoric. I was so happy to be alive that I started writing constantly, although mostly on things not related to the novel."

A common response to heart surgery is depression. Wolfe's was delayed but finally hit in January 1997. "I'd never been depressed before," he says, "and I couldn't understand what was happening to me. I looked at the novel and thought it was a failure. I hadn't told enough about Charlie's early life, Conrad was dull and so forth. It seemed useless to go on with it." At this point, Wolfe's inborn personal reticence became an obstacle to his recovery. He once told an interviewer that he would not take his troubles to his best friend, and he has, in print, cast an unwaveringly gimlet eye on all the therapy manias of the age. "The Me Decade" was his much-quoted and derogatory sobriquet for the '70s.

But eventually Wolfe did unburden himself to a friend, Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist in chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md. "I called and told him roughly what was bothering me and asked him if he could recommend someone I could see in Manhattan. He said, 'The last I heard, trains are still running between there and Baltimore. Why not come see me?' I did, and we talked a lot over the phone, and by early April I was back to normal." But the memory of Wolfe's trying time is echoed in the new novel, when Charlie Croker, observing his at-risk Atlanta mansion and grounds bathed in sunlight, shrinks from the sight and thinks, "The depressed man longs for heavy clouds, fog, mist, chilly weather, downpours, hail."

In the lull between the completion of his novel, which he was still tinkering with in late summer, and all the publication hubbub to follow, Wolfe finds himself with the unaccustomed luxury of free time on his hands. He has filled some of it by accompanying his son Tommy, an accomplished squash player, to tournaments along the East Coast. "I used to play with him," Wolfe says of the son who is 55 years younger, "until I noticed him setting up shots for me. In aging athletes, the legs go first."

Wolfe was a baseball pitcher for his team at Washington and Lee University and says if he had been good enough to reach the major leagues, he would probably never have become a writer. But except for squash, he has been content to remain a spectator of sports ever since. "I never played golf or tennis, and the money I didn't waste on those pursuits I wasted on clothes." He says he owns "30 or 40 suits, I guess" and rewards himself for a good day's work by visiting his tailor to discuss new possibilities. "When I get forms to fill out that include the listing of my hobbies, I always write in 'window shopping.' I wish I could say hang gliding or bungee jumping, but window shopping is the truth."

In fact, free time seems to unsettle Wolfe a bit, since he admits he has "no minor vices" with which to fill the gap. When he arrived on the scene in the early '60s, Manhattan journalists were a notoriously hard-drinking bunch. Wolfe was not tempted to join the boys in the bars. Doing research for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he found himself surrounded by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and unlimited supplies of drugs and hallucinogens. "I always wore a coat and tie and carried a loose-leaf notebook and ballpoint pen," he recalls. "Once, Kesey suggested that I put away the reporter's equipment and just be with the rest of them for a while. I understood this to mean that he wanted me to join the party and take LSD. But I knew another writer who'd accepted this invitation and never picked up his notebook again. So I declined."

Given his dedication to craft over fun, Wolfe seems destined to return to his desk--a custom-designed mahogany construction concealing all sorts of electronic gadgets, including a pencil sharpener--and his manual Underwood typewriter, and begin another book. In fact, he has two in mind. One is a novel about contemporary American education. "The topic sounds dull, but I think there are plenty of madcap escapades going on in that field that might be fun to write about." Teachers and school administrators: beware a man in a white suit entering your classrooms and taking notes. The second is a nonfiction book about social status. "Vance Packard covered this topic in The Status Seekers, which I thought was a terrific book. But maybe it's time to take another look," he says. "We like to consider ourselves free spirits, but here is my Theory of Everything: we're all motivated, and I certainly include myself here, far more than we want to admit, by group expectations. How other people view us has an important effect on how we view ourselves. That's why Charlie fought so hard to gain and retain Turpmtine."

And maybe that's why Wolfe wants to get back to work, gathering facts and risking missed deadlines. He has all the status any writer could want, but A Man in Full promises another megaboost in group expectations.

--With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York