A MAN IN FULL.

Tom Wolfe shows he can write with depth and sympathy

A MAN IN FULL By Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $28.95

I found it hard not to love Atlanta when I lived there from 1990 to 1993 as a reporter. This was not an exotic foreign assignment along the lines of Hong Kong or Johannesburg, but I always treated it as such--much to the amusement of many of my friends, most of whom only ventured from the city's mammoth airport to its Sunbelt downtown. Indeed, a lot of visitors only see the icy sterility of the downtown area, which more or less empties after 5 p.m. Still, there was much to absorb outside the central business district, with its huge buildings by John Portman, the architect-developer who made the big hotel atrium a staple of the American landscape. For me, Atlanta held pleasures that were aesthetic and intriguing. There were the neighborhoods: Lush enclaves like Lullwater where "Driving Miss Daisy" was filmed; quasi-hippie enclaves like Little Five Points and the Mecca of black success, Atlanta University, which includes Morehouse college. I liked the eccentricities of the place. You could go to a dinner party and meet two women named Ginger. You could be in the mountains where "Deliverance" was set in two hours.

But the most intriguing thing, I thought, was the Atlanta ethos about race. Atlanta has no fewer racial woes than other cities. Demographers will tell you that the housing patterns in Atlanta are more like Chicago's than Charleston's--decidedly segregated in the tradition of northern cities rather than southern cities that, even under Jim Crow, have had far less spatial separation. (In fact, the more strict the Jim Crow laws, the less whites in the segregated South seemed to worry about blacks living near them.) Atlanta even had its own mini-riot after the Rodney King verdict in 1992. I was near the melee at the time, which left one man in a coma.

But for the most part Martin Luther King, Jr.'s hometown has had a smoother racial history than other cities. It was not torn by riots in the '60s as Detroit and Newark were. In 1964 the city's mayor, Ivan Allen, was the sole southern mayor to support the Civil Rights act. President Kennedy praised the city's peaceful desegregation of its schools. "The City Too Busy to Hate" is a hyped-up chamber of commerce moniker but it contains an element of truth. Back in the '60s, elites led by Robert Woodruff, the head of Coca-Cola, helped the white establishment get behind--or at least not fight--civil rights. (Woodruff, who presided over an increasingly international company, had bottom-line concerns: He'd have South American bottlers come to town who'd be forced to stay in segregated hotels.) Black leaders like King and Julian Bond pushed and the white elite began to bend. The relative racial peace led to the city's explosive growth. At the end of World War II Atlanta and Birmingham were the same size. But Wallace's Alabama was no place to invest, while the Atlanta of Woodruff and King became home to the likes of UPS and Delta Air Lines.

A few history books have captured Atlanta's complexity, but no novel has even tried. A Man in Full represents Tom Wolfe's attempt to capture Atlanta as well as the entire spectrum of American society. While some critics, like Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times and Jacob Weisberg in Slate, have offered only minimal praise for the book, others have hailed it as a work of genius. Michael Lewis in the Times' Sunday book section declared it brilliant, as did Andrew Ferguson in The Wall Street Journal and John Updike in The New Yorker. I tend to throw myself in the latter camp. This is an extraordinary novel: for its comedy, for its scope, for the way it evokes the Clinton '90s, a time and place of prosperity but relative unease. Bonfire of the Vanities was a warmup act. A Man in Full represents Wolfe at his best.

Anyone who read Bonfire--or the few who suffered through the film version starring the usually terrific Tom Hanks and directed by the usually reliable Brian DePalma--will see similarities with A Man in Full. Like Wolfe's first novel, this latest tome is doorstop heavy and revolves around a character on the verge of falling from the privileged elite into bankruptcy. In Bonfire, the subject of Wolfe's scrutiny was Sherman McCoy, an investment banker who epitomized New York in the go-go '80s. This time it is Charlie Croker, an Atlanta developer in the '90s. (References to the O.J. trial and to Atlanta's current mayor Bill Campbell make it clear that the book is set in the present even though Wolfe has been at this work for 10 years.) Croker, a giant of a man and former star of the Georgia Tech gridiron, is deep in debt. His Croker Concourse, a parody of an Edge City's office-shopping complex, lies empty. And the folks at PlannersBanc want their money back. Croker's world is closing in on him. His second--and, of course, younger--wife offers no comfort. His beloved quail-hunting plantation, Turpemtine, may be put on the auction block. The creditors want his Gulfstream, his Ferrari, his N.C. Wyeth. In Bonfire such men were Masters of the Universe. This time, there's no such memorable label, but Wolfe has created a far more memorable character than Sherman McCoy. McCoy was milquetoast, hiding his affairs, cowering in his run-ins with ghetto youths. Croker has emotional and physical courage--something even the casual reader of Wolfe's books will know that Wolfe admires with an almost homoerotic energy. When Charlie captures a snake on his plantation, it's Wolfe's highest form of flattery. He is a sympathetic figure; his rise was built on more than stock shuffling. He had built things of value and substance and his fall is all the more painful.

Other characters make up the planets in Croker's orbit. There's Fareek (The Cannon) Fanon, a Georgia Tech football player accused of raping the daughter of one of Atlanta's most prominent and socially-connected businessmen. There is Raymond Peepgas, a hilariously drawn character from PlannersBanc. If you ever thought a novel that dealt with banking would be inherently boring, Wolfe will correct you of that misimpression. Among the most memorable moments in the book has Croker getting a "workout" from the bank. Normally, big borrowers are wined and dined by banks--treated to fabulous meals in mahogany conference rooms. The divisions of the bank that distribute loans are sometimes called "sales" or "marketing". But when a big debtor gets into trouble, the royal treatment stops. They are subjected to the workout. Instead of the mahogany room, they get put in some windowless cell with a dying ficus plant and a no smoking sign while the workout team--often ex-Marines--break down the debtor, abuse him and try to force him to dedicate his life to repaying the loan. There's a whole vernacular that Wolfe, as usual, gets right. "Saddlebags" are the pockets of underarm sweat--like a horse's sidebags--that debtors get during a workout.

Other characters enter Croker's world, the most poignant being Conrad. One of the frequent criticisms of Wolfe is that he never had a downtrodden character who merited much sympathy. His characters in Bonfire have often been described as cartoonish. No one will say that about Conrad, a working class guy with two kids, a beatup Hyundai, and a $14-an-hour job hauling 80 lb. crates around a frozen food warehouse. Wolfe's depiction of working-class life is pointed and painful though not terribly complex. Conrad is all nobility, like a working class hero in Dickens. He is sympathetic and morally righteous--more Tiny Tim than the Artful Dodger. Through a combination of disasters, Conrad loses his job at Croker foods and winds up in prison. There have been plenty of harsh depictions of prison life, all replete with toughs and homosexual rape. Wolfe's depiction seems somehow more frightening. Yes, he's got the rape component but in some ways the more horrifying aspects are the mundane, dehumanizing elements of modern prison life--the long stretches in solitary, the powdered eggs for breakfast, the idiotic smoking bans.

The blacks in A Man in Full have far more depth than in Bonfire. There is Roger White, II--a black lawyer who is teased as Roger Too White and who echoes the rage of successful blacks. And the mayor, a Morehouse man named Wesley Dobbs, has all the cunning and racial agility of the pols I covered in Atlanta. Wolfe's raw racial language will make some readers uncomfortable. There's lots of black dialect--but lots of white southern dialect, too. There are parodies of rap artists--RAM YO BOOTY, blast thunderous car stereos. And the depiction of a black athlete--big jewelry, surly attitude--will fuel the worst racial stereotypes. That said, Wolfe's fearless use of language and his willingness to get at raw racial feelings make this a compelling racial read in a way that loftier books on race rarely are.

There are lots of plot twists in the book and, in an odd twist, a lot more on the Greek stoics than you might care to know. But at the heart of the book is a dilemma that is perfectly suited to Atlanta. Can the city fathers cut a deal that will spare The Big Peach racial turmoil when the public discovers that a black football star has allegedly raped a prominent socialite? Charlie Croker is called in to help and faces a personal dilemma that embodies all the moral ambiguity that comes with dealmaking. Ultimately, the book is about moral compromise and how each person deals with it on his or her own terms. This is why the Atlanta setting makes so much sense: It is a business city built on deals, but more than any other American city it is based on a deal between black and white elites.

It's fair to wonder what happened to Wolfe's conservatism. Working class angst, racial turmoil--all this seems like fodder for a liberal novelist, not the white-suited Virginian we've come to know. But Wolfe remains a conservative at heart, more P.J. O'Rourke than Mark Twain. His disdain for the left yields perhaps the book's most obvious fault: Conrad's poverty is owing to the fault of his parents--two wayward Haight-Ashbury hippies who deprived him of a good education and a stable childhood and who hit up their son for money. The depiction of The Left is like something out of Human Events--about as nuanced as a Reed Irvine diatribe. But this is one of the few false notes in the book. For the most part, Wolfe has dropped his neocon irritability. He's no social activist in the vein of an Upton Sinclair or a Clifford Odets, but he doesn't aspire to be and shouldn't be judged according to that standard. (Only totalitarians believe that all art should have a political purpose.) Wolfe has long argued that the contemporary novel should be informed by reporting; it shouldn't be the isolated product of the academy, of writer's programs. He never argued that the novel or his novel should be a tool for social activism and this one is not. This is a reporter's book--a rich and funny took at American life in all its humor and tragedy. And it's got a bonus: On the way to writing about a country, Wolfe also managed to get Atlanta just right.

Matthew Cooper is a deputy Washington bureau chief for Newsweek and a contributing editor for The Washington Monthly.