“The only reward to be expected from the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.”
—Voltaire

When Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities came out in England more than a decade ago, I reviewed it in the Times with that special elation obscure Soviet dissidents once reserved for their brethren mentioned by name at disarmament conferences and peace summits. Here, after all, was one of our own, yet so famous he was now safe. Here was a sartorial rebel, an avowed syntactic guerrilla, a wolf in wolfs clothing, an insouciant raconteur who not only did not give a damn about the half-truths of the moment, he dared to expose the half-lies. Here was a bad boy with his finger in the dyke, a devil-may-care moralist holding back a universal flood of immoral banality. Here was a stain of purity on the covers of whorish magazines, spitting sardonic paradoxes in the face of a reading public that their editors did their best to corrupt. Later, of course, some of those famous dissidents turned out to have been KGB stooges, but that is not the point. At least I don’t think it is.

Not only was The Bonfire of the Vanities a splendid novel which had slipped through the cordon sanitaire of the American press to spread its moral contagion, it was a novel about the American press. Or, to put it more accurately, about the life and fate of the individual in a political and cultural environment where all mechanisms of redress, and all cultural trappings, are travesties, while the power of the press is as real as that of a monarch under absolutism. This was what I said in my Times review, at any rate, without wasting valuable column inches on whether the author was a new Thackeray or Tolstoy. A few days later, an exquisitely calligraphic letter arrived from Wolfe, then in London on a promotional tour, agreeing with me that this was, indeed, what his novel was all about.

The one essential observation that made my reading convincing and, as it later turned out, conclusive, is that every single character in Wolfe’s “novel of New York” is a hypocrite. From my Moscow childhood, I exhume the image of those huge round presentation boxes of assorted chocolates, each a different shape and each wrapped in a different color of foil. No matter which shape or color you chose, they all tasted like soya. This Orwellian image is both memorable and plausible, because of course all the chocolates used to come from the same candy factory, which, like every other candy factory in Russia at the time, operated under the same set of commercial and social—that is to say, political and cultural—rules, circumstances, or conditions.

It would have been wholly implausible if the dramatic conflict of Wolfe’s novel had centered on what one might call the plight of an honest man, just as some ecstatic reminiscence of the one piece of candy that did on occasion subvert the uniformity of those boxes —a chocolate bottle filled with Cuban rum, as I recall—would only lead the reader away from the one point worth making on the subject of Soviet confectionary and the soya sameness of life under totalitarianism. No, The Bonfire of the Vanities was all tarantulas in a bottle. Given the absolutist pressure of the press on its characters—from Yale to grave and from adolescence to Wall Street, reaching into every crevice of private morality and intellectual makeup, limited by nothing save its own corporate interest—where would that “honest man” have come from? Unlike its 19th-century, pre-totalitarian counterpart, living literature in this century is not written as a story of exceptions.

Nor did the cosmic hypocrisy at the core of the novel’s microcosm ever work to diminish the human complexity of Wolfe’s characters. Why would it? When one is describing Sodom, it stands to reason that everyone there should be portrayed as some kind of catamite. Thus everybody in Brunei is rich. The native inhabitants of Nigeria are all black. Every man in Israel can handle an automatic weapon. Surely their objective sameness in these important respects need not result in cardboard flatness, predictable development, or social stereotyping. Well, everybody in New York is a hypocrite, and Wolfe was artist enough to say this in The Bonfire of the Vanities through characters who were at once plausible and memorable.

Tragically for Wolfe’s talent for dissent and his reputation as a writer, his new and long-awaited novel, A Man in Full, is about an “honest man.” It is as though, for the past 12 years, some invisible critical apparatus, a pneumatic drill deep in the bowels of Conde Nast, has been droning into his ear about Thackeray and Tolstoy; about the perils of literary cartooning; about large—perhaps even monumental but certainly many-dimensional or polyvalent—unpredictable, internally contradictory, lifelike, soulful characters who ought to populate his next masterpiece. And, as though grown deaf in that one ear, this St. George of New York with perfect pitch for a lance has produced a work which only half-belongs to a time, a place, or a people.

Back to the 19th century, folks. Less archetype, more soul. Humanity. Decency. Honor. Virtue. Ideals. Such is the author’s new stomping ground in A Man in Full. Suffice it to say that a good third of the novel is taken up by the conversion of the “honest man”—a working-class youth named Conrad Hensley when we first meet him—to the philosophy of Epictetus, “drawn,” according to the author’s acknowledgment on the flyleaf, “from The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, edited by Whitney J. Oates (1940).” I am not turning up my nose at this bibliographic confession out of sheer uncontrollable snobbery, as in fact an edition of a book with that title does play an important part in the story of the working-class Ganymede, wrongly imprisoned in Santa Rita with only Zeus to summon for consolation. I am citing it because it reveals the extent to which Wolfe’s critical intelligence has been clogged by the selfsame stuff he has garnered such acclaim for ridiculing, namely, culture. And by “culture,” apart from your average great American novelist’s absurd longing to write like Thackeray or Tolstoy, is meant the inert, downy, static lint of old-world names, deities, and attitudes that is worse than any Harlequin Romance rubbish, particularly when it is allowed—straightforwardly, reverently, and at times triumphantly, as it is hereto cling to the plot of a novel set in Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1990’s.

Anyway, why Atlanta? Because it is diverse, complex, and unpredictable, that’s why, which is another way of saying that the author knows as little about Atlanta as I do. Because, in the mind of any amateur novelist aspiring to culture and haunted by the literary greats of the last century, Atlanta would be as good a place to discover Epictetus as any. I have never doubted that Tom Wolfe knows his New York, his Manhattan, or his Hamptons, because he has always shown by his writing that there is only one thing about that microcosm that matters. The thing may be vast, complicated, often confusing, leading as it does to a thousand other things, but it is as “immovably centered”—to quote Goethe’s definition of genius—in time, place, and circumstance as Disney World is in the cartoonist’s whimsy, or Israel in a perpetual state of war.

Atlanta, by contrast, is to Wolfe a house of many mansions, a veritable sesame of conjecture where no miracle is too far-fetched, no social juxtaposition too crude, no political insight too superficial or elastic. Here, at last, he has a free hand to imagine and describe whatever the hell he wants, so long as it sounds like Thackeray or Tolstoy. Here, he no longer has to paint from nature, constrained by the knowledge and observation of half a century, and can simply let his imagination soar with the zigs and zags of an insufferable plot that culminates in a kind of Zeus-ex-machina apocalypse, an earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area that destroys the jail where the anguished hero prays to his highfalutin god. All of this is so preposterous and badly executed that even a veteran admirer like myself can only conclude that the author of A Man in Full is just a few gray hairs short of a mid-life crisis, in the usual sense of weakened critical sensibility plus a whole lot of advice from the wrong people. Reading it is a little like watching Woody Allen in the role of Hamlet.

Not all of the book is foolish, pretentious, or shoddy in the same measure, however. The chapters on the inner workings of PlannersBanc, squeezing the life out of the novel’s deuteragonist and other acolyte of Zeus, real-estate developer Charlie Croker, are fine and funny in the good old Bonfire of the Vanities way. In part, this is so because here Wolfe deploys generic corporate situations, such as the bankruptcy workout session with Croker in the bank’s boardroom, which belong as easily to New York as to Atlanta, without pausing to think whether or not he is writing on the level to which he ought to become accustomed, that of a classic. In fact, almost everything in the book that can be imagined happening in Manhattan bears the familiar hallmarks of Wolfe the dissident and Wolfe the intellectual thug, in contrast to Wolfe the culture stooge and Wolfe the classic. Consider the following contretemps, where some of Croker’s fair-weather friends and would-be clients have just been watching the insemination of a mare by a prize stallion in the care of Croker’s stud manager, Johnny:

“Looked great, Johnny,” said Charlie. “You guys did a great job.” But his mind was still spinning with Herb Richman, Herb Richman, Herb Richman . . . Then he got an idea. Liberal, liberal. He wouldn’t treat Johnny, the conductor of the show, like a hired hand. He’d introduce him. Equality, equality. Liberal, Jewish.

“Johnny,” he said, “I want you to meet one of our guests . . . Hebe Richman.”

What had he just said! A scalding feeling swept over his brain.

“I mean Herb Richman! Godalmighty, Herb, I must be losing my grip, I guess—” He lifted his hands helplessly. “Herb Richman, Johnny!” He looked about. Everyone had heard him. “Jesus, Herb, that must be my Alzheimer’s flaring up!” And why had he said “Jesus”?

I have just counted, and I make it that the above passage contains 120 words. Despite everything deprecatory I have had to say in this review against Wolfe’s new novel, any writer who can draw a situation so cosmically hilarious and convincing on a single leaf from a lined notepad is not so stone-deaf that he cannot make a comeback. Besides, as they probably say in Atlanta, better a wolf with jus’ one good ear than all ’em ole hawgs wi’ two.

 

[A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 742 pp., $28.00]