A Man in Full

The ``big panoramic novel about contemporary life’’ is published in November, 1998. A Man in Full tells the story about the decline and fall of an Atlanta real estate developer named Charlie Croker and about a million other things. Its 742 pages mark it as the longest of all of Tom’s books, perhaps the most ambitious. It is certainly the biggest seller, and the most extravagantly reviewed. Critics love the long passages of description, the intimate detailing of how things work, and the presence of at least one character who is sympathetic.

Michael Lewis, by now a best-selling writer himself, does the honors in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. ``The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist,’’ writes Lewis, while also admitting that ``the ending is typically disappointing. It’s unfortunate that Wolfe doesn’t know how to end his novels but there isn’t much to be done about it.’’ He calls it ``a monumental comic novel.’’

Michiko Kakutani, writing in the daily paper, says A Man in Full is ``a big if qualified leap forward for Mr. Wolfe as a novelist.’’ It is a ``nimble, often enthralling,’’ big work of ``social realism, based on research and reporting.’’

Perhaps the most contentious reviews, however, come from novelists Norman Mailer and John Updike.

Mailer, writing in the New York Review of Books, is at once full of praise and condemnation.

``It is a 742-page work that reads as if it is fifteen hundred pages long,’’ he writes. ``This is, to a degree, a compliment, since it is very rich in material. But, given its high intentions, it is also tiresome, for it takes us down the road of too many overlong and predictable scenes.’’ He ultimately decides, ``It is Tom Wolfe’s best book by far, it begins to promise that he is ready to become a great American novelist, and then it loses its air and settles (with all the canniness of a hard-nosed business judgment) for being a Mega-bestseller.’’

Updike, meanwhile, writing in the New Yorker, concludes that A Man in Full ``amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form,’’ and faults Tom for failing to ``be exquisite,’’ as defined by Henry James. This apparently means that a writer should distill his material down so that it has ``intensity, lucidity, brevity, beauty,’’ and is as confounding and unsatisfying a criticism as it sounds.

Tom is beyond reviews at this point in his career; A Man in Full goes on to shoot up the best-seller list. It will eclipse the performance of The Bonfire of the Vanities and sell 1.4 million copies. Tom has conquered America.

That’s still not enough. Tom also wants the last word. I think here of the Herald Tribune and the aftermath of The New Yorker articles, or the response to ``The Billion-Footed Beast’’ in Harper’s. He gets it, in a piece he writes for his final collection, Hooking Up, which appears two years later. Entitled ``My Three Stooges,’’ this piece, not published anywhere before its appearance in that collection, is a rare personal essay that provides just a glimpse of what a Tom Wolfe memoir might have looked like. It also gives Tom a chance to offer his final thoughts on writing fiction.

He describes what took him so long to write A Man in Full. No mention of his heart attack and quintuple bypass in 1996, or subsequent bout of depression – he has mentioned that in at least two major interviews before. But he says he was out there reporting. He wanted to cram the world into A Man in Full. He then describes the critical reception of the novel, his record sales, his appearance on the cover of Time.

``The scene is now set for the extraordinary thing that happened next,’’ he continues. ``I have searched, and I can come up with nothing else like it in all the annals of American literature. Three big-name American novelists, heavy with age and literary prestige – John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving – rose up to denounce A Man in Full.’’

Updike and Mailer -- ``those two old piles of bones’’ – did it in reviews. John Irving erupted in a temper tantrum on Canadian television. Invited on to the same program to respond, Wolfe calls the trio, ``my three stooges.’’ They were feeding him ``lines I couldn’t have dreamed up if they had asked me to write the script for them.’’

And why? Because A Man in Full is ``an example of the likely new direction in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literature,’’ the intensely realistic novel. It is a revolution in content rather than form ``that would soon make our prestigious artists, such as our three old novelists, appear effete and irrelevant.’’

He describes their latest, largely forgettable productions, and singles out a remark by Updike in an interview, that there just didn’t seem to be readers anymore for literary fiction.

Tom asks: ``Were my eyes deceiving me? Was this man actually saying that the lack of interest in the `literary’ novel in the year 2000 was the readers’ fault?’’

He then recounts the history of the post-war novel, beginning with the Lionel Trilling remark that the realistic novel is dead. ``After 1960 came the era of young writers in the universities educated in literary isms, all of which were variants of French aestheticism, products of the notion that the only pure art is art not about life but about art itself.’’ Is it any wonder readers were no longer excited by this stuff?

Tom then describes a 1999 Wall Street Journal article by drama critic Terry Teachout, in which Teachout declared that for Americans under age 30, film has replaced the novel ``as the dominant mode of artistic expression.’’ Tom agrees, but only up to a point. Movies now embody intensely realistic storytelling. But there are some things film can’t do. They can’t recreate a character’s internal point of view and they can’t really explain ``anything.’’ And this is why the naturalistic novel will never die.