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A Man in Full: A Novel Kindle Edition
The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. With A Man in Full, the time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians.
Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble.
The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist.
A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateApril 1, 2010
- File size1159 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From AudioFile
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Amazon.com Review
On many counts, the answer would have to be yes. Like its predecessor, A Man in Full is a big-canvas work, in which a multitude of characters seems to be ascending or (rapidly) descending the greasy pole of social life: "In an era like this one," a character reminds us, "the twentieth century's fin de siècle, position was everything, and it was the hardest thing to get." Wolfe has changed terrain on us, to be sure. Instead of New York, the focus here is Atlanta, Georgia, where the struggle for turf and power is at least slightly patinated with Deep South gentility. The plot revolves around Charlie Croker, an egomaniacal good ol' boy with a crumbling real-estate empire on his hands. But Wolfe is no less attentive to a pair of supporting players: a downwardly mobile family man, Conrad Hensley, and Roger White II, an African American attorney at a white-shoe firm. What ultimately causes these subplots to converge--and threatens to ignite a racial firestorm in Atlanta--is the alleged rape of a society deb by Georgia Tech football star Fareek "The Cannon" Fanon.
Of course, a detailed plot summary would be about as long as your average minimalist novel. Suffice it to say that A Man in Full is packed with the sort of splendid set pieces we've come to expect from Wolfe. A quail hunt on Charlie's 29,000-acre plantation, a stuffed-shirt evening at the symphony, a politically loaded press conference--the author assembles these scenes with contagious delight. The book is also very, very funny. The law firms, like upper-crust powerhouse Fogg Nackers Rendering & Lean, are straight out of Dickens, and Wolfe brings even his minor characters, like professional hick Opey McCorkle, to vivid life: In true Opey McCorkle fashion he had turned up for dinner wearing a plaid shirt, a plaid necktie, red felt suspenders, and a big old leather belt that went around his potbelly like something could hitch up a mule with, but for now he had cut off his usual torrent of orotund rhetoric mixed with Baker Countyisms. Readers in search of a kinder, gentler Wolfe may well be disappointed. Retaining the satirist's (necessary) superiority to his subject, he tends to lose his edge precisely when he's trying to move us. Still, when it comes to maximalist portraiture of the American scene--and to sheer, sentence-by-sentence amusement--1998 looks to be the year of the Wolfe, indeed. --James Marcus
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Review
--The Wall Street Journal
"Superior...utterly engrossing."
--USA Today
"The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written--not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist....The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Wolfe is a peerless observer, a fearless satirist, a genius in full."
--People --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
--The Wall Street Journal
"Superior...utterly engrossing."
--USA Today
"The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written--not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist....The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Wolfe is a peerless observer, a fearless satirist, a genius in full."
--People --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Inside Flap
The setting is Atlanta, Georgiaa racially mixed, late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 29,000 acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife, and a half-empty office complex with a staggering load of debt.
Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, idealistic young father of two, is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods warehouse near Oakland and finds himself spiraling into the lower depths of the American legal system. And back in Atlanta, when star Georgia Tech running back Fareek "the Canon" Fanon, a homegrown product of the city's slums, is accused of date-raping the daughter of a pillar of the white establishment, upscale black lawyer Roger White II is asked to represent Fanon and help keep the city's delicate racial balance from blowing sky-high.
Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real estate syndicatesWolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most admired novelist. Charlie Croker's deliverance from his tribulations provides an unforgettable denouement to the most widely awaited, hilarious and telling novel America has seen in agesTom Wolfe's most outstanding achievement to date. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Cap'm Charlie
Charlie Croker, astride his favorite tennessee walking horse, pulled his shoulders back to make sure he was erect in the saddle and took a deep breath . . . Ahhhh, that was the ticket . . . He loved the way his mighty chest rose and fell beneath his khaki shirt and imagined that everyone in the hunting party noticed how powerfully built he was. Everybody; not just his seven guests but also his six black retainers and his young wife, who was on a horse behind him near the teams of La Mancha mules that pulled the buckboard and the kennel wagon. For good measure, he flexed and fanned out the biggest muscles of his back, the latissimi dorsi, in a Charlie Croker version of a peacock or a turkey preening. His wife, Serena, was only twenty-eight, whereas he had just turned sixty and was bald on top and had only a swath of curly gray hair on the sides and in back. He seldom passed up an opportunity to remind her of what a sturdy cord--no, what a veritable cable--kept him connected to the rude animal vitality of his youth.
By now they were already a good mile away from the Big House and deep into the plantation's seemingly endless fields of broom sedge. This late in February, this far south in Georgia, the sun was strong enough by 8 a.m. to make the ground mist lift like wisps of smoke and create a heavenly green glow in the pine forests and light up the sedge with a tawny gold. Charlie took another deep breath . . . Ahhhhhh . . . the husky aroma of the grass . . . the resinous air of the pines . . . the heavy, fleshy odor of all his animals, the horses, the mules, the dogs . . . Somehow nothing reminded him so instantly of how far he had come in his sixty years on this earth as the smell of the animals. Turpmtine Plantation! Twenty-nine thousand acres of prime southwest Georgia forest, fields, and swamp! And all of it, every square inch of it, every beast that moved on it, all fifty-nine horses, all twenty-two mules, all forty dogs, all thirty-six buildings that stood upon it, plus a mile-long asphalt landing strip, complete with jet-fuel pumps and a hangar--all of it was his, Cap'm Charlie Croker's, to do with as he chose, which was: to shoot quail.
His spirits thus buoyed, he turned to his shooting partner, a stout brick-faced man named Inman Armholster, who was abreast of him on another of his walking horses, and said:
"Inman, I'm gonna--"
But Inman, with a typical Inman Armholster bluster, cut him off and insisted on resuming a pretty boring disquisition concerning the upcoming mayoral race in Atlanta: "Listen, Charlie, I know Jordan's got charm and party manners and he talks white and all that, but that doesn't"--dud'n--"mean he's any friend of . . ."
Charlie continued to look at him, but he tuned out. Soon he was aware only of the deep, rumbling timbre of Inman's voice, which had been smoke-cured the classic Southern way, by decades of Camel cigarettes, unfiltered. He was an odd-looking duck, Inman was. He was in his mid-fifties but still had a head of thick black hair, which began low on his forehead and was slicked back over his small round skull. Everything about Inman was round. He seemed to be made of a series of balls piled one atop the other. His buttery cheeks and jowls seemed to rest, without benefit of a neck, upon the two balls of fat that comprised his chest, which in turn rested upon a great swollen paunch. Even his arms and legs, which looked much too short, appeared to be made of spherical parts. The down-filled vest he wore over his hunting khakis only made him look that much rounder. Nevertheless, this ruddy pudge was chairman of Armaxco Chemical and about as influential a businessman as existed in Atlanta. He was this weekend's prize pigeon, as Charlie thought of it, at Turpmtine. Charlie desperately wanted Armaxco to lease space in what so far was the worst mistake of his career as a real estate developer, a soaring monster he had megalomaniacally named Croker Concourse.
"--gon' say Fleet's too young, too brash, too quick to play the race card. Am I right?"
Suddenly Charlie realized Inman was asking him a question. But other than the fact that it concerned André Fleet, the black "activist," Charlie didn't have a clue what it was about.
So he went, "Ummmmmmmmmmmm."
Inman apparently took this to be a negative comment, because he said, "Now, don't give me any a that stuff from the smear campaign. I know there's people going around calling him an out-and-out crook. But I'm telling you, if Fleet's a crook, then he's my kinda crook."
Charlie was beginning to dislike this conversation, on every level. For a start, you didn't go out on a beautiful Saturday morning like this on the next to last weekend of the quail season and talk politics, especially not Atlanta politics. Charlie liked to think he went out shooting quail at Turpmtine just the way the most famous master of Turpmtine, a Confederate Civil War hero named Austin Roberdeau Wheat, had done it a hundred years ago; and a hundred years ago nobody on a quail hunt at Turpmtine would have been out in the sedge talking about an Atlanta whose candidates for mayor were both black. But then Charlie was honest with himself. There was more. There was . . . Fleet. Charlie had had his own dealings with André Fleet, and not all that long ago, either, and he didn't feel like being reminded of them now or, for that matter, later.
So this time it was Charlie who broke in:
"Inman, I'm gonna tell you something I may regret later on, but I'm gonna tell you anyway, ahead a time."
After a couple of puzzled blinks Inman said, "All right . . . go ahead."
"This morning," said Charlie, "I'm only gonna shoot the bobs." Morning came out close to moanin', just as something had come out sump'm. When he was here at Turpmtine, he liked to shed Atlanta, even in his voice. He liked to feel earthy, Down Home, elemental; which is to say, he was no longer merely a real estate developer, he was . . . a man.
"Only gon' shoot the bobs, hunh," said Inman. "With that?"
He gestured toward Charlie's .410-gauge shotgun, which was in a leather scabbard strapped to his saddle. The spread of bird shot a .410 fired was smaller than any other shotgun's, and with quail the only way you could tell a bob from a hen was by a patch of white on the throat of a bird that wasn't much more than eight inches long to start with.
"Yep," said Charlie, grinning, "and remember, I told you ahead a time."
"Yeah? I'll tell you what," said Inman. "I'll betcha you can't. I'll betcha a hundred dollars."
"What kinda odds you gon' give me?"
"Odds? You're the one who brought it up! You're the one staking out the bragging rights! You know, there's an old saying, Charlie: 'When the tailgate drops, the bullshit stops.'"
"All right," said Charlie, "a hundred dollars on the first covey, even Stephen." He leaned over and extended his hand, and the two of them shook on the bet.
Immediately he regretted it. Money on the line. A certain deep worry came bubbling up into his brain. PlannersBanc! Croker Concourse! Debt! A mountain of it! But real estate developers like him learned to live with debt, didn't they . . . It was a normal condition of your existence, wasn't it . . . You just naturally grew gills for breathing it, didn't you . . . So he took another deep breath to drive the spurt of panic back down again and flexed his big back muscles once more.
Charlie was proud of his entire physique, his massive neck, his broad shoulders, his prodigious forearms; but above all he was proud of his back. His employees here at Turpmtine called him Cap'm Charlie, after a Lake Seminole fishing-boat captain from a hundred years ago with the same name, Charlie Croker, a sort of Pecos Bill figure with curly blond hair who, according to local legend, had accomplished daring feats of strength. There was a song about him, which some of the old folks knew by heart. It went: "Charlie Croker was a man in full. He had a back like a Jersey bull. Didn't like okra, didn't like pears. He liked a gal that had no hairs. Charlie Croker! Charlie Croker! Charlie Croker!" Whether or not there had actually existed such a figure, Charlie had never been ableto find out. But he loved the idea, and he often said to himself what he was saying to himself at this moment: "Yes! I got a back like a Jersey bull!" In his day he had been a star on the Georgia Tech football team. Football had left him with a banged-up right knee, that had turned arthritic about three years ago. He didn't associate that with age, however. It was an honorable wound of war. One of the beauties of a Tennessee walking horse was that its gait spared you from having to post, to pump up and down at the knees when the horse trotted.
He wasn't sure he could take posting on this chilly February morning.
Up ahead, his hunting guide and dog trainer, Moseby, was riding yet another of his walking horses. Moseby signaled the dogs with a curious, low-pitched, drawn-out whistle he somehow produced from deep in his throat. Charlie could just make out one of his two prize pointers, King's Whipple and Duke's Knob, ranging through the golden sea of sedge, trying to get wind of quail coveys.
The two shooters, Charlie and Inman, rode on in silence for a while, listening to the creaking of the wagons and the clip-clopping of the mules and the snorts of the horses of the outriders and waiting for some signal from Moseby. One wagon was a rolling dog kennel containing cages for three more pairs of pointers to take turns in the ceaseless roaming of the sedge, plus a pair of golden retrievers that had been born in the same litter and were known as Ronald and Roland. A team of La Mancha mules, adorned in brass-knobbed yokes and studded harnessing, pulled the wagon, and two of Charlie's dog handle... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
.
In 1965 he published The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and in 1968 The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test were published simultaneously. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers was published in 1970.
In 1975 Wolfe published The Painted Word, an incandescent, hilarious look at the world of modern art; it caused as much controversy as anything Mr. Wolfe has written. Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine, a collection of essays, was published in 1976.
The Right Stuff, a national bestseller published in 1979, won the American Book Award for general nonfiction. The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters named Mr. Wolfe as recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for distinguished service in the field of journalism. From Bauhaus to Our House, his distinctive look at contemporary architecture, was published in the fall of 1981 and became another national bestseller; in 1982 he published The Purple Decades: A Reader. Mr. Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities was published in 1987, and went on to become one of the top ten bestselling books of the decade.
Tom Wolfe lives in New York City. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product details
- ASIN : B004TNHAXY
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (April 1, 2010)
- Publication date : April 1, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 1159 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 764 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,868 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2 in Political Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #4 in Political Fiction (Books)
- #6 in Legal Thrillers (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.”
Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University, graduating cum laude, and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lived in New York City.
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I have listened to several audiobooks overt the last few months, and I have found that no matter what the subject or author, what makes or breaks an audiobook is the narration/reading. Most have been good. (Anything narrated by Boyd Gaines should be avoided.)
In contrast, "A Man in Full" is expertly narrated by David Ogden Stiers, best-known as Major Winchester on "M*A*S*H". He brought depth and life to every character in the novel, and was able to differentiate each character so as to stand out in the listener's mind.
Stiers' diction and intonation were extremely helpful in describing each scene, and the motivations behind each character. One can easily pick up on the nervous fear & frustration in Conrad on his fateful day when he fails his typing test, has his car towed, is jerked around by surrounding characters who seem to go out of their way to keep him from getting enough change for a phone call, then by the staff at the impound lot, after which you finally hear him snap, resulting in his failed attempt to steal back his own car, resulting in his imprisonment.
I howled out loud at the sheer improbability of Charlie and Conrad coming together through what seemed like fate (or was it the hand of Zeus?). One could almost sense this about to happen, however, but the manner in which it occurred, and the subsequent outcome of their meeting (as opposed to what most readers, like myself, might have predicted), is (as Wolfe might write), a jolt to the solar plexus.
(P.S. - Is there a Tom Wolfe novel without "solar plexus" in it?)
The effect is an almost mythic tale that actually hinges upon the near mythic account of certain long-dead philosophers. The plot, the dialogue and the characters are clearly designed to serve one another in equal measure, building a story that's true in the way that all myths are true - because of what it means to illustrate. It's meant to be over the top, and Wolfe smiles and winks with every joyous excess.
That's why the sudden collapse of the story line at the end of the book seem entirely unfair and deeply disappointing. With 700 pages of preparation and at least four major plotlines all converging at last, I expected a bombastic finish worthy of the buildup. What I got instead was 25 or so hurried pages that tied up every loose end in the least satisfying way imaginable; a contrived dialogue where one character explains everything that went unwritten. Deux Ex Machina may be a classic mythic device but it's never felt so cheap as it does here; even bad detective stories routinely do a better job at this.
Imagine a Beethoven symphony building for almost an hour to a quick finale composed of a breezy ragtime tune; the sudden change in atmosphere that came at the very end of this book was that jarring. One can almost imagine that the author himself was disappointed to end it this way, his love for the characters having been so evident for so long.
I truly felt cheated, and can only imagine that an editorial decision or publishing deadline caused the sudden and traumatic amputation of such a florid story line. The last chapter, "Epilogue", could easily have sustained 100 more lushly written pages of exploration as these characters finally reached full flower. Is it too much to hope for the re-released "Director's Cut?"
Top reviews from other countries
We follow the intertwined stories of 4 men. Charlie Cocker is a rich businessman in Atlanta who, from the start, seems a bit tired with how is life is unfolding. Roger White is a young Atlanta lawyer, ambitious, with honorable work and family values. Roger Peepgrass is an executive banker, also in Altanta, dissatisfied with his job and with a messy personal life. And finally, Conrad Hensley is a young family man who works in a factory on the West coast.
I found the prologue and the first 3-4 chapters difficult to read. I had even tried a sample of the book in the past and dropped it for something else. After reading The Bonfire of the Vanities (and absolutely loving it), I gave A Man in Full another try and boy was it worth it.
I highly recommend if you love a story that follows different characters through a united, complex storyline.
The horse mating scene on its own is worth the price of the book!
Reviewed in Germany on November 19, 2023
Delightful and gorgeous.