Peter Conrad
A MAN IN FULL by Tom Wolfe (Jonathan Cape)
The brash, skyscraping egos of America love to build monuments to themselves. In his second novel, Tom Wolfe surveys the skyline of Atlanta, the country’s latest mushroom metropolis, and notes that those spires of ghostly, uninhabited glass are sustained by nothing more than speculative puffery. Atlanta’s developers are “hypnomaniac” self-advertisers like Wolfe’s Charles Croker, who fancies that he has annexed the universe by means of a multinational company grandiosely known as Croker Global. A Man in Full, narrating Croker’s financial disgrace and his gratuitous redemption, promises to fill out the figure of the tycoon and his parvenu society. But this over- hyped blockbuster ends as the inflated, flatulent image of the vices it supposedly decries.
Between 1965 and 1976, in a series of books extending from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby to Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, Wolfe zappily reinvented the art of reportage. Then he made a fatal, hubristic error, exchanging lowly journalism for fiction. His Bonfire of the Vanities should have been a waspish essay on the fickle consumerism and institutional venality of the Eighties; instead, predicting apocalypse in a Manhattan overrun by Reaganite yuppies, it lunged towards grandeur and became tall – like a jumped-up skyscraper – by walking on stilts.
On that basis of that single, lucrative act of pretension, Wolfe’s publishers now salute him as “our most admired novelist”, which slights John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal and a dozen others.
Emboldened by such fawning, Wolfe reappears after a decade’s silence with A Man in Full, which gluttonously strains to gobble up the contemporary world by stuffing itself with journalistic controversies and disasters. Croker is explicitly modelled on Robert Maxwell. A sub-plot features an insolent black athlete, like Mike Tyson and OJ Simpson joined at the groin, accused of raping a white socialite. Across the continent, the San Francisco earthquake creakily facilitates another plot.
The title gives notice of Wolfe’s ambition to take on the entire history of the form; from Fielding’s Tom Jones to Musil’s Man without Qualities, the novel’s bravest aim has been to tell the whole truth about individuals.
Wolfe can weigh Croker, who tips the scales at 235 pounds, and tabulate his assets in a numbing numerical ledger: he owns 29 000 acres of Georgia forest, along with 59 nags, 22 mules and 40 gundogs. He also happens to owe the bank half a billion greenbacks. Yet Croker, like his debts, is a row of exponentiating, empty zeros.
Then Croker announces his redemption at a press conference, but because there is nothing inside him, Wolfe cannot make his change of heart plausible – unless you are prepared to believe that this brawling, semi-literate jock would really have reassessed his life after reading Epictetus.
Has there been writing as coarse as this – as vulgar and violent, as otiosely overdone, as flushed with ugly, crimson tumescence – since the heyday of Mickey Spillane, whose PI, Mike Hammer, indifferently brutalised men, women and the English language?
This is a book whose very typography can give you an earache. Wolfe’s style is the equivalent of a ghetto blaster. Giving up the effort to use words expressively, he relies on amps – silently conjured up by tabloid capitals and inky italics – to hype his meaning. A telephone rings, and Wolfe mimics it: “Trrrilll”. (He does this 12 times because, I suppose, the phone goes on ringing.) A fight between convicts begins with the pummelled loser squealing “Awwwhhhhhh!” Then he screams “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Finally he screeches “ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”. This time there are fewer consonants and no exclamation mark, but the italics presumably vouch for an intenser agony.
Another American talent, alas, has been sabotaged by vanity and cupidity. No wonder Jonathan Cape had A Man in Full under pre-publication embargo: it should have stayed there.