THE U.S. MALE

Manhood and boyhood have been enduring subjects in Wolfe’s work. In his early writings, he reveled in the way 1960s culture was turning men into boys — in the energy and enthusiasm created when boyish energies are unleashed upon the world. In his second collection of essays, the 1968 Pump House Gang, Wolfe observed that the United States was in the midst of a “happiness explosion,” and all the pompous intellectual talk about alienation in America was merely window-dressing for a cultural revolution that elevated the sensation-seeking pleasures of youth above everything else. That same year, in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he offered a joyous portrait of men in their thirties and forties, calling themselves the “Merry Pranksters,” who tried to relive or extend their adolescence well beyond the stretching point by traipsing around America on a Day-Glo bus.

But by 1976’s Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, Wolfe had begun to rethink his celebration of boyishness. In the essay “Jousting with Sam and Charlie,” he paid tribute to the bravery of American pilots in Vietnam who got up at 5:45 every morning to do their jobs the best way they knew how — even though it was clear that the war and their missions were doomed.

Three years later, in The Right Stuff, Wolfe moved back in time from Sam and Charlie to Chuck Yeager, the great American test pilot of the 1940s and ’50s, and to the original Mercury astronauts of the early ’60s. The quality Wolfe believed these men shared was manhood at its best: a spiritual stillness forged from equal measures of self-confidence and fatalism.

His 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, might have been called “The Wrong Stuff” since, with the exception of a tough Bronx judge, not a single male character in the book has an ounce of manhood in him. The protagonist, Sherman McCoy — the Wall Street broker who fancies himself a “Master of the Universe” and is brought low because of his vanity — experiences a moment of doubt early in the novel when he realizes he can’t explain what he does for a living to his six-year-old daughter: Unlike every father in every generation before his, Sherman does nothing tangible, creates or cultivates nothing by hand.

That isn’t true of Charlie Croker, the “man in full” at the center of Wolfe’s new novel. Croker is a real-estate developer who has been brought low because of something tangible he created — a failing office complex in suburban Atlanta that, in a fit of vainglory, he named after himself. At first glance, Croker seems merely another Master of the Universe, transferred to the New South. He’s sixty years old, with a colossal ego and a gorgeous second wife. We meet him as he leads a quail-hunting expedition on his plantation, a huge cash-drain of a place with fifty-nine horses and a servile black staff who call him “Cap’m Charlie” — the kind of wild excess that led the New Yorkers of The Bonfire of the Vanities into a spiritual and moral sewer.

But Charlie Croker is no Sherman McCoy. He knows the depth of his own folly, and even on horseback, in the opening pages of the novel, worry about the financial wreckage of his “Croker Concourse” burns in him “like an inflammation”:

He, Charlie, was a one-man band. That was what a real estate developer was, a one-man band! You had to sell the world on . . . yourself! Before they would lend you all that money, they had to believe in . . . you! They had to think you were some kind of omnipotent, flaw-free genius. Not my corporation but Me, Myself & I! His mistake was that he had started believing it himself.

And while Sherman McCoy panics at the first sign of trouble, Croker proves far more formidable. In the amazing second chapter of A Man in Full, Croker is subjected to a “workout” by officials at his bank — a hazing session whose purpose is to humiliate him and crush his spirit so that he will be amenable to the painful steps he will have to take to settle his gigantic debt. His bank officer, a weasel with the Dickensian name of Raymond Peepgass, is intimidated by Croker:

Christ, he was a brute, for a man sixty years old! He was an absolute bull. His neck was wider than his head and solid as an oak. . . . Croker was almost bald, but his baldness was the kind that proclaims masculinity to burn — as if there was so much testosterone surging up through his hide it had popped the hair right off the top of his head.

Peepgass watches with glee as the “workout artiste” at the bank, Harry Zale, tries to take Croker apart. And though every single excess in spending that Zale details seems appalling and Croker’s recalcitrance seems petty, Zale’s conduct comes to seem contemptible because it is so profoundly unmanly. With the swagger and false masculinity of a Master of the Universe, Zale mocks Croker, his down-home accent, even his war record in Vietnam. When Croker objects to selling his plantation because of what he calls “a dimension that involves pain and suffering, that involves a human cost,” Zale goes for the kill:

“Hey, wait a minute,” said Harry, lifting both hands, palms outward, and casting his eyes down in the gesture that says, Please, no more. “I understand pain. I understand suffering. I understand human cost.” Now he looked straight at Croker, with a gaze that bespoke the utmost sincerity. “I’ve been there. I was in the war. . . . I lost four fingers. . . .”

With that he raised his right fist above his head as high as it would go, with the back of his hand twisted toward Croker, so that it looked like a stump of a hand with only the ridges of the four big knuckles remaining. Then he raised a single finger upward, his middle finger, and kept it that way, a look of quizzical sadness on his face.

“Sell it,” he said.

Peepgass is thrilled by Zale’s ugly triumph, until Croker rises from his chair and, limping from an old football injury, curses him. “All at once,” Wolfe writes, “Peepgass was aware that everybody in the room, at both ends of the table, was looking at him”:

A moment ago he had felt avenged against Croker and his entire saber-toothed ilk. And now he stood here paralyzed while a scalding realization spread through the very lining of his skull: “I can’t take this man on! Not even verbally!”

To which Croker “shook his head disdainfully and turned away and continued his gimp-legged retreat from the room.”

As the novel progresses, Peepgass finds himself trying, almost literally, to become Charlie Croker. He devises a daring illegal scheme to take over Croker’s real-estate holdings and even finds himself making time with Croker’s first wife. His own wife had thrown Peepgass out after learning that he had impregnated a woman on a business trip to Finland, and rather than take manly responsibility by admitting his paternity, Peepgass is fighting his Finnish mistress in court. Only by imitating Charlie Croker can Peepgass turn himself into a simulacrum of manhood.

But just how manly is Charlie Croker? He would seem to have every credential — college football star, decorated veteran, brilliant marksman, so strong and vital that he can capture a rattlesnake with his hands. Still, his financial woes seem to make him shrink. He is increasingly incapacitated by his football knee. He cannot sleep at night. Worse, he becomes (or fears he has become) impotent.

And he thinks only of himself. Despite his professed concern for the “human cost” of selling his plantation, Croker doesn’t blink at laying off a thousand workers in the only part of his financial empire that actually makes any money — a wholesale food business. That decision sets off a catastrophic chain of events in the life of Conrad Hensley, a twenty-three-year-old Californian who wears “the droopy mustache that young men grow in hopes of appearing older and graver and . . . well, tougher.”

Conrad works the graveyard shift in a Croker Global Foods warehouse outside Oakland, and Wolfe’s account of Conrad’s descent into hell is the most powerful and moving writing he has ever done. First, we follow Conrad on his last night at Croker Global, where he labors as part of the “Suicidal Freezer Unit” — working eight-hours in sub-zero temperatures moving gigantic masses of frozen food around on forklifts.

He squatted again and lowered the carton onto the pallet on the front of his jack. When he stood up, a jolt of pain went through his lower back. He glanced down —

Blearily, in the periphery of his vision, he could see little glints and sparkles. Ice crystals were forming in his mustache. Sweat had run off his face, and mucus had flowed from his nose, and now his mustache was beginning to freeze up. . . . He looked at his hand. He made a fist. Then he undid it and splayed his fingers out and turned them this way and that. They were extraordinarily broad, his fingers. From yanking, and carrying the eighty-pound cartons, they were pumped up, bulging with little muscles. They were . . . stupendous . . . and grotesque at the same time. His hand looked as if it belonged to someone twice his size.

That night, without even giving it so much as a thought, Conrad saves the life of a co-worker by leaping onto him and pushing him out of the way of a runaway forklift. Shaken, terrified, he takes a break, only to find everybody starting at him (the way everybody in an earlier chapter had stared at Peepgass).

He blushes to realize that they think he is a hero: “He had just . . . done it, in a moment of terror. And he was still terrified!”

And then, in a sentence that seems almost a throwaway on page 130 of a 742-page book, Wolfe gives us the key to A Man in Full: “That he shared these guilty, submerged, utterly inexpressible feelings with most of the heroes of history, he had no way of knowing.” Conrad is the one true man in the books, someone who has willfully chosen to take responsibility for himself and others. The child of exhippies who probably got their ideas about life from the Merry Pranksters, Conrad actually married his high-school sweetheart when he got her pregnant, forcing him to work rather than pursue his nascent interest in philosophy at San Francisco State or Berkeley. The father of two small children, he works his miserable job without complaint to fulfill a simple hope — ownership of a condominium in Danville, California.

Conrad is a figure straight out of nineteenth-century fiction, a successor to Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin or one of the faultless women who appear in the novels of Dickens: a moral exemplar, a paragon of virtue, a near-saint. And his downward spiral takes on the aspect of a pilgrim’s journey down into the slough of despond and back up to renewal. In a series of perfectly rendered scenes, Conrad finds his car towed in Oakland and must frantically try to reclaim it before the impound lost closes at 7 P.M. When he is falsely charged with beating up an attendant at the lot, he refuses to accept a suspended sentence by pleading guilty — for the plain reason that he is not guilty and couldn’t face his children if he lied.

As a result, he ends up in the Alameda County Jail, which provides Wolfe with yet another opportunity to dazzle us with his reportage and sympathetic imagination. In jail Conrad finds the key to his salvation when he is mistakenly sent a copy of an anthology called The Stoics and discovers the Roman philosopher Epictetus:

What little bit Conrad had learned about philosophy at [community college] had seemed to concern people who were free and whose main problem began with the assumption that life is hard, brutal, punishing, narrow, and confining, a deadly business, and that fairness and unfairness are beside the point. . . . Only Epictetus had looked his tormentors in the eye and said, “You do what you have to do, and I will do what I have to do, which is live and die like a man.”

It comes as a shock to realize that what Tom Wolfe, master satirist and portraitist, is offering us in A Man in Full is an exegesis of Stoicism — but that is indeed what he is doing. And by the novel’s end, he has contrived to bring Conrad and Charlie Croker together so that Croker can finally become the “man in full” he has always had the possibility, but rarely the will, to be.

There is much, much more in A Man in Full, largely centering on a dubious rape accusation made by the daughter of a white millionaire against a star black athlete. This part of the novel, which is never less than engaging, is not the equal of the rest — and Wolfe falters with his depiction of the book’s fourth major character, a black lawyer named Roger White whose old fraternity brother, the mayor of Atlanta, presses him into service to get the rape accusation quashed. Neither White nor the mayor is credible, and their private conversations are stilted and false. Despite Wolfe’s diligent efforts to depict the two cultures of the South, white and black, he simply cannot inhabit his black characters in the same way he inhabits Croker, Peepgass, and Conrad Hensley. Nor are the women in the book much more than stick figures; Wolfe tries to give them breadth and perception, but they do not come to life.

Even so, A Man in Full is in competition with Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool as the best American novel of this decade. It’s interesting, and meaningful, to note that those two books are also about “men in full” — about men who strive to maintain their dignity and strength in a world that values neither.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz is associate editor of the New York Post.