The title, A Man in Full, is the first of many brilliant strokes in Tom Wolfe’s rich, crazy, flawed, and deeply moving new novel. A Man in Full is, first and last, a meditation about manhood — about what it means to live in a nation that worships boys and their games rather than men and their struggles.
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.
