|
"Did
you ever unravel a baseball?...After you take the white horsehide
cover off, you come across a ball of white string...There's about
a mile of the stuff, once you start unraveling it, all this white
string. Finally you get down to the core, which is black,
a small black rubber ball. Well, that's Atlanta. The
hard core, if we're talking politics, are the 280,000 black folks
in South Atlanta...Wrapped all around them, like all that white
string, are three million white people...So how do those white millions
deal with that small black core?"
How indeed? Tom Wolfe concentrates that question into
the central hub around which revolve the main spokes of his new
novel, A MAN IN FULL. Fareek "the Cannon" Fannon
is a young black football star at Georgia Tech University accused
of raping the daughter of a prominent white businessman. The
situation has the potential to become a racial powder keg for a
city trying to cast off its antebellum past in light of the success
of the 1996 Summer Olympics and the prominence of companies such
as CNN.
Wolfe details the lives of three central characters in this ambitious
story --- Roger White II, Conrad Hensley, and the MAN IN FULL himself,
Charlie Croker. With a mix of race, class, politics,
and corporate finance, Wolfe has fashioned a novel grand in scope,
full of insight, humor, and hard, brutal truths about personal responsibility
and redemption.
Roger White II, or Roger Too White as everyone calls him, is enlisted
to act as counsel for Fannon. A lawyer who took his middle-class
beginnings to partner status at a local, mainly Caucasian law firm,
Roger is one of the "beige brothers," a light-skinned
African American who has turned his back on his own history in an
attempt to make it in the white legal world.
Charlie Croker is a Georgia Tech football legend and prominent Atlanta
real estate developer with a penchant for stamping his name on everything. Even
on the verge of financial collapse, Charlie is a man full of pride,
full of himself, and unwilling to accept the fact that his posh
world is crumbling around him. Trying to keep face while
attempting to salvage his little kingdom, Charlie worries about
satisfying his young second wife. A beautiful "boy
with breasts" --- as his first wife calls her successor ---
Serena's tastes are as lavish as the plantation, houses, and office
buildings that Charlie has amassed.
PlannersBanc, the institution that irresponsibly allowed Charlie
to build his mountain of debt to a whopping half a billion dollars,
is now trying desperately to redeem itself by calling in Charlie's
loans. The "workout" --- a detailed financial
surgery where assets are sold off to reduce outstanding debt ---
and their subsequent attempt to attach Charlie's holdings make for
a fascinating look behind the glass and steel curtain where fortunes
are made and lost in corridors of power we rarely see.
As we follow the Croker empire west, we meet Conrad Hensley, who
works a backbreaking warehouse job in a Croker Global Foods division
in California. When the company goes through with a massive
layoff, Conrad loses his job and his dreams of a better life for
his wife and children. It's a bizarre turn of events
that take him from a working family man to a convict in the space
of a few days and his descent into a hellish prison rife with racism
and brutality show Wolfe at his powerful best.
Wolfe brilliantly braids these three lives together to form a work
of passion and ambition. Roger exemplifies a man in search
of his place on the color bar. Charlie is an anachronistic
man trying to find a foothold in modernity. Conrad becomes
the moral compass whose magnetic north pulls these characters in
the direction of their own personal salvations.
The Wolfe trademark is here as well...his wit is sharp and on the
mark, from his tongue-in-cheek rap lyrics to the names of his cast
of characters. If there is one fault with A MAN IN FULL,
it is the abrupt ending. Wolfe seems in a hurry to wrap
things up and in doing so leaves us hungering for more; however,
the hasty denouement in no way lessens the impact of this intense
work of fiction.
A MAN IN FULL is a big book --- big in every way. It
weighs in at a hefty 742 pages and had a first printing of 1.2 million
copies. It's a comic novel with a very serious core or,
perhaps, one could call it a serious novel laced with comic situations. Whatever
you choose to call it, it is a novel with lofty intent that delivers
the goods. A MAN IN FULL turns out to be a book in full...and
then some.
--- Reviewed by Vern Wiessner
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
