A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

I started reading this novel right after I finished Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!", and it was as if my fever had broken and I had risen from my sick bed and walked again. The contrast between the two cannot be greater. Wolfe's prose is clear, powerful and engaging.

The book is huge, over 300K words, but it is not repitition that fills the pages, it is detail. Super-realistic detail about the lives and surroundings of the characters continues untiringly to the end. It is not considered a Southern gothic novel, although I could make an argument that it is. Scenes like the breeding stable and the prison, characters like Conrad Hensley and Charlie Croker, and the examination of race and greed are worthy of the rest of the Southern gothic genre. It is a novel about the South, set for the most part in south Georgia and Atlanta. The plot is not especially complex, but it is detailed. The story revolves around the wealthy businessman Charlie Croker and those people in his sphere of influence.

It is very interesting to examine how this huge novel is constructed. It is 3rd person POV with five viewpoints. For the most part the viewpoint changes occur at breaks in the narrative, but beginning in about the last third of the novel Wolfe starts to speed things up and viewpoint changes occur within scenes more and more frequently. In the last full chapter (not the epilogue) the viewpoint changes 20 times between the five characters, sometimes just for a short paragraph to tell us what someone is thinking. This is all done very smoothly and seamlessly.

In a novel this size pacing has to be important. I have to admit the first half seemed to drag. The only character I really felt empathy for was Conrad, the young man laid off by Croker's business decision that ended up in prison, etc. etc. I was hoping he would have a major part to play in the novel and I was not disappointed. The strange coincidences involving Croker and Conrad and the stoic philosophy underline the whole moral point of the novel.

One of those coincidences, the earthquake that occured at just the right time to free Conrad from prison was almost too much for me to swallow. I started questioning the whole point of that deus ex machina. Cynically I wondered if Conrad had been placed by the author in California instead of the South just so that he could be freed by the earthquake. It doesn't matter, I suppose, but that was the weakest point of the plot.

I was also disappointed by the ending. I thought that Charlie would do something different and his attempt at evangelizing the audience just did not seem right to me. I always thought the stoics spread their beliefs by example?

Tom Wolfe has gotten somewhat of a bad reputation by having an ego, and after reading this book I am surprised by some of the things I have read in his interviews and essays. It seems that a man with a large ego would not write a book like this, espousing the stoic philosophy. The paperbook copy that I have gives you a good example of his ego though. In large red letters on the front "Tom Wolfe" - the title of the book seems almost an afterthought, in small black text, appearing almost as a nickname - Tom "a man in full" Wolfe.

It's an excellent book though, and I highly recommend it - if you have the time to read it. For the student of the craft of writing novels it is an excellent example to study.