A Man In Full
Tom Wolfe’s Classic Novel

4,675 words

One of Tom Wolfe’s most celebrated books, A Man In Full, concerns the nature of masculinity. Of course, that remarkably brief take is rather like saying that Crime and Punishment is about the practical limits of utilitarianism. There’s quite a lot going on in it, which is to be expected since it’s a little longer than Dostoyevsky’s classic. Therefore, I won’t get too far into my usual blow-by-blow. I’ll proceed after the premise with a thematic analysis of this classic from 1998.

The Background

Charlie “Cap’m” Croker – the man in full, as an old poem goes – is a business magnate from Atlanta. He has quite an illustrious past, first as a football star who served double duty, playing both offense and defense. (As many of us are aware, sportsball is practically a religion in Dixie.) Then he was a decorated combat veteran in Vietnam. Following that, he became a real estate magnate, rather like Atlanta’s version of Donald Trump, and with the same characteristic impetuousness. He also owns a food distribution network comparable to Sysco, Alliant, or Ahold. Deep into middle age soon after his sixtieth birthday, trouble is on the horizon for this great man.

The foremost of his several problems is that despite having a tremendous financial empire, he’s drowning in debt. As the proverb goes, someone who owes a hundred dollars to the bank will go hungry, but someone who owes a million dollars to the bank will dine at the city’s finest restaurants. For Charlie, that stops working; his luck is running out. In particular, his largest debt is half a billion smackeroos owed to PlannersBanc – formerly the Southern Planters Bank and Trust Company, until the word “planter” became too politically incorrect.

Then an ugly event changes the trajectory of the book. This involves the alleged rape of a college student, the daughter of one of Charlie’s friends in the business community. This is by a football player, Fareek “The Cannon” Fanon. (That’s an obvious reference to Frantz Fanon, an AK‑47-toting psychiatrist, and surely the Martinican graphomaniac suffering from Afro-dyspepsia would’ve had plenty to discuss about the racial angle.) Major civil unrest could result; Southerners take exception to that sort of thing. I’ll add that at the time of writing, a fair number of elderly Georgians could remember the days when sometimes the remedy was a positive population adjustment involving eighteen feet of rope – problematic, of course, but with a 0% recidivism rate.

Since Charlie Croker was a former high priest of the football religion and therefore can influence sportsball addicts, certain municipal figures want to use him to calm the rubes. They’re prepared to coerce him, using his massive debt as the bargaining chip. His part of the deal would be to praise the misunderstood Fareek, becoming a character witness for the dear disadvantaged darling in the court of public opinion. Precious, isn’t it? Since cucking out was still unpopular back then, as well as stabbing friends in the back, then complying with the demand would’ve made Charlie a social pariah.

It’s never made incontrovertibly clear what really happened in Fareek’s dorm room. No charges have been filed, apparently for lack of evidence that would stick in court. Still, eventually signs point to this being a consensual hookup leading to buyer’s remorse and ultimately a “he said, she said” incident. So despite the hood rat having the usual constellation of unpleasant characteristics, it’s entirely plausible that he committed no crime after all. If that’s correct, as the book implies, then it goes without saying that the alleged victim could clear it up, but it would put her at risk of being disinherited. [1] Mudsharking didn’t fly back then. Putting oneself into compromising situations can end badly, so grotesque turpitude should be avoided.

Wolfe’s other writings demonstrate that he was aware of trends that would lead to the campus rape witch hunt that would peak in the 2010s. This was fueled by the confluence of diminishing moral standards (hookup culture), broader and blurrier definitions of what constitutes wrongdoing, binge drinking, false allegations for revenge, a media feeding frenzy, and atrocity propaganda. Heinous crimes are quite dreadful, of course, but the truth is that campuses are no more dangerous than the general population – they’re a little safer, if anything. However, the way the feminists were telling it, coeds were as imperiled as if they were spending four years among atavistic troglodytes in Papua New Guinea, which simply isn’t so.

Notable Locations

The book uses a number of iconic places to showcase the action. The intricate descriptions are part of what contributes to the lengthy word count. Surely the author had to do much research on architecture, fancy types of marble and wood, as well as lots of other features adorning the buildings.

One of these locations is Croker Concourse, an office park built out in the boonies. The centerpiece is a 40 story skyscraper, mostly empty, and thus a ruinously expensive boondoggle somewhat like the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang. Charlie bit off more than he could chew with this, an instance of hubris leading to downfall, and an avoidable consequence of his ego. His impetuous business style worked for a long time, but he overstepped his limit with this one. He intended for it to become the nucleus of an edge city bearing his name, and a permanent legacy that would remain long after his death. Unfortunately for him, the “build it and they will come” approach was a big miscalculation.

Other than that, much of the action takes place in Buckhead. Atlanta is a majority black city, and has been for a while. The Buckhead neighborhood up north is the marshmallow floating on the urban cup of cocoa, though according to what I’ve heard, the marshmallow had been getting somewhat darker. I was there once, a couple years ago, but didn’t get to do much sightseeing, since at the time I was barely able to walk. Overall it’s a pretty location. From what I could observe, the locals like well-groomed dogs and marijuana.

This is where Charlie’s opulent mansion is, purchased for $2.75 million and in the ritziest part of the neighborhood. His ex-wife lives around there as well. Naturally, black and Hispanic maids do the upkeep for these stately pleasure domes, arriving daily by the busload. (The wealthy will blow a king’s ransom on fancy houses, yet are too greedy to hire their own people to maintain them. That didn’t change after 1865!) Some other action takes place in neighboring Chamblee, nicknamed “Chambodia” because of all the fresh-off-the-boat Asians. Dixie isn’t entirely the same these days.

Turpmtine – written just as it’s pronounced – was once an antebellum plantation specializing in turpentine production. (The thick “Jawjuh” accent permeates the book like the scent of pine tar, magnolia flowers, and peach blossoms. On-the-go translations of the heavy dialect contributed to the voluminous word count.) Now it’s Charlie’s home away from home. This is no mere country dacha:

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.

The enormous size is a necessity for maintaining a self-sustained quail population. Even so, it’s yet another sign of Charlie’s larger-than-life ostentation. He disguises it as a business expense, calling it an agricultural research station.

I’ll add that this sort of thing isn’t implausible at all. Earlier I worked for a (((billionaire CEO))) who owned a ski lodge in Vail, Colorado and wrote it off as a local branch office. Sweet! What could be more fun than cheating on your taxes while skiing? Well, I can’t really needle him too much, since his head is screwed on a lot straighter than many other 0.001%ers.

A New Spin on Some Familiar Elements

There are some obvious commonalities with Wolfe’s previous blockbuster, The Bonfire Of the Vanities. The books have a racially charged incident underlying the plot, of course. Both protagonists are fabulously wealthy, even though paradoxically Croker is drowning in red ink and has a staggeringly negative net worth. Both are first-rate egomaniacs, one of the symptoms of end stage affluenza. The author takes particular delight in puncturing their swollen heads by the death of a thousand cuts. I wanted to like the protagonists, but just couldn’t because of their egomania.

Moreover, it doesn’t help that they let their little heads do the thinking, which isn’t so praiseworthy and leads to avoidable trouble. In Sherman McCoy’s case in The Bonfire Of the Vanities, at the point he should just ‘fess up to his wife about his extramarital affair, he tries to lie his way out of it instead. It’s rather painful to read, and she ain’t buying his Clintonian evasions anyway. As for Charlie Croker, casting aside his first wife – the mother of his son – was lousy behavior on his part. Still, the misdeed was its own punishment, since his new trophy wife is a pain in the ass – not so unusual for gold diggers.

One needn’t be a distributist to realize Sherman McCoy’s high finance racket is rather flaky. Being a middleman, rather than a producer, normally shouldn’t make someone an ultra-wealthy “Master of the Universe.” His fortune isn’t from creating something of value, but rather about exploiting the quirks of securities trading to get an inordinate piece of the action. Fascist economics frowns on that sort of thing. This represents financially inefficient overhead, and is even parasitical after a certain extent. His wife’s mildly derisive “golden crumbs” speech does illustrate the point, after his young daughter asks how he makes his money.

Likewise, Charlie Croker’s business practices aren’t always the cleanest. For one thing, he fomented a racial incident. This stunt drove down property values so he could scoop up land dirt-cheap for his Croker Concourse project – not too glorious there!

Finally, both books feature an obsessed antagonist. The Bonfire Of the Vanities has a prosecutor hunting for a “Great White Defendant.” This is so he doesn’t have to feel so bad that nearly all his case load involves locking up black and Puerto Rican ne’er-do-wells.

In A Man In Full, the Captain Ahab role is played by a wormy bankster, Ray Peepgass, a victim of Wolfe’s Dickensian naming. He’s eaten up by jealousy of Charlie Croker, becoming an obsessed rival. (Really, the rivalry is one-sided and Charlie only wants him to buzz off.) Still, the two have some commonalities. For one thing, they’re drowning in red ink, with the bankster burdened by several maxed out credit cards. Both have similar moral foibles. The difference is that there was little fallout when Croker traded in his starter wife for a newer model, but Peepgass got baby-trapped and embroiled in a paternity lawsuit. He’s particularly incensed with the differing outcomes.

More Themes

Charlie is the old-school type and quite politically incorrect. For example, he doesn’t care for an exhibition of homoerotic art that he attended very reluctantly, and makes his feelings about it remarkably clear. Here’s one of the milder things he had to say:

“Tell me, Mr. Croker, how did you come to be interested in art?”

The presumption made him angry. “Good Lord,” he said, “who on earth told you I was interested in art?”

Startled, the woman lifted her hand and gestured vaguely toward the table, the atrium, the museum . . .

He felt almost as if somehow his manhood had been called into question. “I’m not interested in art, and I’m sure as hell not interested in this show or this museum. But if you want to do business in Atlanta, you come to these things.” He shrugged, as if to add, “It’s as simple as that.”

The woman was left speechless, which suited him fine.

He has a pronounced dislike for postmodernism. It’s hard to fault him on that! He gets a good wallop of it at the banquet following the exhibition, amounting to purple prose trashing normality. He didn’t care for all that any more than the paintings of swinging dicks:

Charlie looked about to see if everybody else heard what he was hearing. But even Billy’s and Doris’s heads were turned in a polite blankness toward the podium.

—”that Lapeth chose the prison as the subject matter of the art treasures we see around us tonight. As Michel Foucault has demonstrated so conclusively in our own time—the prison—the actual carcerel, in his terminology—the actual center of confinement and torture—is but the end point”—

Who? thought Charlie. Michelle Fookoe? He looked at Serena, who was turned about in her chair drinking in every word as if it were ambrosia.

—”the unmistakable terminus—of a process that presses in upon us all. The torture begins soon after the moment of birth, but we choose to call it ‘education,’ ‘religion,’ ‘government,’ ‘custom,’ ‘convention,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘Western civilization.’ The result is” —

Am I hearing what I think I’m hearing or am I crazy? thought Charlie. Why wasn’t somebody at one of these many tables hissing?—or something—

—'”a relentless confinement within ‘the norm,’ ‘the standard,’ a process so”—

Oh, how he twisted those words norm and standard! Such passionate contempt!

The postmodernism torture session drags on and concludes with:

General, unquestioning, routine, ceremonial applause. How could the man go on that way, that long, without mentioning what this exhibition was actually about!

Charlie began hissing, but nobody even noticed, except for the woman with the Palm Beach Crash Helmet, who looked at him not only as if he were repulsive but also as if he had a room to let upstairs.

Being politically incorrect isn’t a bad thing, but he shows it at the wrong times. For instance, a discussion about an AIDS fundraiser leads to hearty joking about venereal disease at the dinner table. (((Herb Richman))), a prospective investor and someone obviously a lot more hip to these matters, provides his enlightened commentary:

“He’s a certain type of Southerner you hear about but you can’t really appreciate unless you see him up close, on native ground, as they say. He has this”—he shook his head—”thing about Southern manhood. He hasn’t got the first clue that this happens to-be the beginning of a new century. He thinks he’s a great patron of the African Americans who work on his plantation. You should’ve heard the way he brought his butler out and made him recite to the whole dinner table all the ways ol’ massa’s helped him and his children out. He”—he shook his head again—”you had to be there to believe it, it was all so patronizing. You also had to hear him on the subject of gay rights. Gay rats, he pronounced it. . .”

Charlie can’t even virtue-signal correctly? Ooh, burn! As much as I hate to agree with a twerp like Herb, he did have a point. Despite Charlie’s remarkable charisma, not adapting to changing climate and keeping some of the edgy talk under wraps as needed was hurting his business prospects. It’s true that by the 1990s, with political correctness getting prickly, there were situations in which letting it all hang out just didn’t fly. That’s not how things should be, of course, but one must choose one’s battles carefully. There are better times for that than at work or meeting with clients.

Another subplot involving these changing times is the backdrop of municipal politics. There’s a mayoral election coming up. The incumbent is black. So is the other candidate, described in the beginning as an “activist” – scare quotes in the original. That’s probably how it rolls with every majority black city these days, where the mayoral races come down to a choice between black or blackety-blackety-black. It seems that they always vote for their own kind, which is actually understandable. Sometimes majority white cities will elect a black mayor, but does it ever work the other way? (If so, can someone in the peanut gallery let me know in the comments section so that I can be surprised as hell?) Atlanta has indeed been run by black mayors continually since 1974, though very light-skinned ones up until they started to darken somewhat in 2002. “Colorism” was a point of contention in the 1997 campaign – that is to say, the election was partly about whether the incumbent had enough melanin. The book parallels this, in which the race hinges on whether the mayor seeking reelection is black enough, genetically and ideologically.

Another one of the black municipal figures, Roger White II, got stuck with the unfortunate sobriquet of Roger Too White. As a Booker T. Washington fan, since college he’s been plagued with being perceived as insufficiently radical:

Alas, the late seventies were a time when, especially at Morehouse, the number-one elite blueblood black college in America, molder of the much-vaunted Morehouse Man, you had to be for the legacy of the Panthers and CORE and SNCC and the BLA and Rap and Stokely and Huey and Eldridge, or you were out of it. Black Atlanta’s own Martin Luther King had been murdered not even ten years before, and so obviously gradualism and Gandhiism and all that were finished. If you were a proponent of Booker T. Washington, then you were worse than out of it. The way people acted, you might as well have been waving a placard for Lester Maddox or George Wallace or Eugene Talmadge.

He shores up his tenuous hold on cultural authenticity by becoming overbearing. The story ends with a discussion between these blacks in city government, providing exposition for the dénouement and taking on the role of a Greek play’s chorus. There was a bit of a “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” vibe with all that, somewhat irritating from my perspective.

Finally, Southerners especially have a concept of one’s rightful place in society, though this generally remains an implicit understanding in the book. Fate doesn’t take kindly to overstepping boundaries. Croker’s greatness gave him a lot of wiggle room for transgressive audacity, though obviously it had its limits. Peepgass quickly got smacked down by the hubris-to-nemesis dynamic, although he deserved worse in the end. The bankster is quite indignant to discover the hard way that Fate had him on a much shorter leash. Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi and all that. (As Fyodor Dostoyevsky might’ve put it, feeling that you’re exceptional doesn’t mean it’s OK to whack pawnbrokers.) Fareek Fanon was acting out of his place too, causing a good bit of fallout. Still, if this character were a real athlete, I doubt the sex scandal would be an impediment to ascending to the National Felons League one day.

Masculinity: Impressive, Better, Degenerated, and Absent

Again, the primary focus is on the nature of manhood. Charlie does exemplify manliness from one perspective, to an exaggerated degree. Cap’m Croker is, of course, a big sportsball star. He’s a combat veteran tested in battle. He remains fit and muscular long after demobilization, in good shape other than a fried knee that’s catching up to him. He’s married to a sexy wife a little under half his age. He performs impressive feats of machismo, like wrangling venomous snakes. The list goes on: mental strength, boldness, social prominence, etc.

Most of all, there’s the enormous bulge in his trousers formed by his wallet: a mansion, a business empire, a baronial hunting preserve, and – for Kek’s sake – a freaking Gulfstream private jet. Wealth is his most distinguishing characteristic, making him exceptional. Someone lacking that, but having all his other positive traits, wouldn’t be so larger-than-life. However, that degree of wealth is unrealistic for an ideal, since it’s out of reach for all but a tiny few, and would be socially unsustainable. At risk of sounding like a pinko, society barely can afford the 0.001%ers it already maintains in sumptuous luxury. A more realistic standard would be for a man to be prudent, financially independent, and mindful of obligations. Charlie is falling behind in these areas, despite his vast holdings.

If being filthy rich is an obligatory prerequisite to the package deal of masculinity, then hardly anybody measures up. Who is both strong and ultra-wealthy, to say nothing of Croker’s other attributes? I can think of only Elon Musk and Christian Grey, and the latter is a fictional character in wish-fulfillment chick porn. Most 0.001%ers are weaklings and limp noodles. (To borrow a turn of phrase by General Patton, Suckerberg couldn’t punch his way out of a piss-soaked paper bag. The same goes for Jeffrey Epstein’s buddy, the big software developer.) If living like a king is necessary to be a real man, then nearly everyone is doomed to be “second rate” until we have Star Trek matter replicators to solve the scarcity problem. Since I’m not a billionaire, I might as well declare myself nonbinary, cancel my gym membership, and subscribe to the Oprah Channel, right?

More to the point, is “he who dies with the most toys, wins” all there is to it? Perhaps there’s another kind of manhood. This might be exemplified by, let’s say, a guy who cheerfully performs dangerous and backbreaking labor to support his family. Then he loses his job because his dickweed CEO made a dumb business decision a while back, and in the aftermath, tries to save money by laying off the people who get the work done. Things get far worse, and he all but goes to hell and back for his family.

We’ll be hearing a lot from this righteous proletarian, Conrad Hensley, in the book. (My only quibble is that occasionally he gets called Connie – a fine name for a shapely brunette hottie, but not so much for a guy.) Through him, the stoicism of Epictetus plays a large role in the book. For one thing, there’s a lot of good stuff there. In this particular case, it’s a fine antidote for the severe affluenza that afflicts Charlie Croker.

Next up for consideration is Fareek Fanon, elevated to stardom because he can run with an oblong ball. (No doubt he enrolled in college on a full scholarship for particle physics, aerospace engineering, or advanced mathematics, but I forget what exactly.) He isn’t a serious exemplar of manhood, since he’s an empty-headed punk who’d amount to nothing if not for the American vice of football worship. Still, he’s an interesting foil to Cap’m Croker himself, and the two do have quite a memorable meeting of the minds later in the book. Both are athletes, and both are remarkable egomaniacs, but that’s where the resemblance ends.

Fareek’s form of machismo is the ghetto variety – bling, insolence, sulky gazes, swagger, and all the rest of it. Inside his thick skull is a deluge of thumos with barely a trickle of nous. The Bonfire Of the Vanities goes on in depth about the “pimp roll,” and it’s easy to imagine him strutting around like that. Curiously, his pride in his African heritage doesn’t preclude him from miscegenating with white heiresses. Often his transcendental self-absorption comes across as utter detachment. Here’s how he, accompanied by his football coach (doing double duty as a babysitter), greets the city official who’s trying to rescue him from the monstrous scandal:

The long legs were utterly ajar. The long arms rested slackly on the sofa’s seat. The milky-white eyes, set in a dark brown face beneath the brow of a shaved head, stared with utmost sullenness. [. . .]

Fareek “the Cannon” Fanon didn’t budge. He waited a couple of beats, then gave Roger Too White a barely perceptible nod and a little shrug of the lips that seemed to say, “So you’re here. So what?”

McNutter glowered, clenched his teeth, mouthed the words “Get up!,” then pantomimed Get up! with his chin.

The Cannon gave McNutter the little lip shrug, which now seemed to say, “Why’ve I got to put up with this Good Manners shit?” [. . .]

The Cannon said nothing. Instead, he gave Roger Too White a quick look up and down, a dubious look, as if to say, “Why would I care what some bitch in a suit like you thinks about me?”

All told, in person, he’s about as wonderful as one might expect. He can’t remember who was in his bed, other than “Some white girl goes to Tech.” At a later time, he pouts about the rape allegation messing up a product promotion deal.

Roger closed his eyes again. Technically Fareek was still an amateur, even though amateurism in Division I intercollegiate football had become pretty much a joke. Fareek was not only not supposed to be encouraging three sneaker manufacturers like Ironman, Mars, and Mishima to bid for his endorsement when he turned pro, he wasn’t even supposed to know about such things. Worse, by presenting his plight as a matter of money, he was throwing away his sentimental advantage as the put-upon Boy from the Ghetto Who Made Good.

“Muh’fuh . . .” said Fareek, “all some hubba ho got to do is run a game on you, and these bitches in suits’at run these companies, they don’ wanna know your name no more.” Fareek shook his great shaved head as if human perfidiousness had never before been pushed to such an extreme.

Somehow I can’t work up much sympathy about it either, even though the accusation turned out to be on flimsy grounds.

Last up is the troublesome nonentity Ray Peepgass, his ridiculous name suggesting a squeaky fart. He isn’t an exemplar of masculinity either, except in the negative. He’s not ugly, though his physiognomy is overall rather immature and squishy. In short, he’s a “beta male” type. I regard this as a curable condition, usually. However, self-improvement won’t be enough to fix your love life or overall popularity if you have a green tentacle growing from your forehead.

Peepgass is an “incompetent and knows it” character, similar to Ellsworth Toohey in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and about as pleasant. He wants to be a larger-than-life tycoon like Cap’m Charlie, enjoying the big bidness lifestyle and its perks. The problem is that he’s a pipsqueak who doesn’t have what it takes. His envy doesn’t go well for him; trying to follow the same path leads to trouble. Surely he could’ve put in the hard work to be the best man he could be and start accomplishing impressive things, but instead he wanted to get rich quick.

The book doesn’t explore the political angle of that. This is unlike The Fountainhead, in which Ellsworth Toohey is a genteel pinko. I note that the envy and desire for instant gratification is the same mentality as that of resentful leftists and their intersectional rainbow coalition making endless demands. The minority entitlement complex, of course, is something else that Southerners understand quite well, having been made all too familiar with it in modern times.

A Final Look

One way to regard the book is that it’s a Russian novel made in America, and for the same reasons as Dune. Despite A Man In Full being in English and from the wrong side of the Arctic Ocean, the characteristics are all there. For one thing, with a length exceeding that of Crime and Punishment, it’s definitely in that league. (Surely the Sierra Club was tempted to take out a fatwa on Tom Wolfe for printing it.) The book is actually above quota for screwed-up dinner party scenes. There’s plenty of philosophical digression, though fortunately in bite-sized chunks rather than The Brothers Karamazov approach. Although there’s a John Galt Speech, mercifully it gets interrupted.

Anyway, if you like long novels full of laser-guided satire with memorable characters and plot twists aplenty, A Man In Full is a good pick.

Notes

[1] There aren’t too many WASP jokes, but here’s one I made up:

Q) How do you say “Fuck you!” in the ancient Anglo-Saxon language?
A) “I’m cutting you out of the will.”