TOM WOLFE, MATERIAL BOY.

Embellishing a doctrine

Tom Wolfe splashed into the national consciousness in the summer of 1970 with "Radical Chic," his New York magazine account of a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers thrown by Leonard Bernstein and wife in their Park Avenue duplex. The piece was a succes de scandale that impressed by the impudent cunning of its commando raid on limousine liberalism. Here indeed was a "new" journalism, freed to be sly, to slander by implication and the damning detail. When Wolfe described maids serving from "gadrooned silver platters," and a guest inwardly rhapsodizing over Roquefort hors d'oeuvres ("It's the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese...") as the Panthers held forth on revolutionary violence, you didn't need to know what a gadroon was to see that the Bernsteins and their socialite friends were in trouble. Eavesdropping not only on conversations, but on minds, Wolfe plumbed an inner ooze-of-consciousness sticky with self-flattery, covetousness, and other thoughts too naughtily incorrect (as we say nowadays) to utter. This was a journalism of the fox let loose in the chicken coop.

Through the 1970s, America's least welcome party guest applied his Day-Glo conservatism to architecture (From Bauhaus to Our House) and art (The Painted Word), witty polemics defending your and my sensible aesthetic intuitions-that paintings should be beautiful, and houses comfy-against a cabal of modernists bent on our eternal bafflement. Wolfe's shrewd co-optation of hip style in service of a meat-and-potatoes cultural agenda won countless admirers, who hailed him as a brilliant satirist with a voice extravagant as America itself. And when inevitably these fans began to wonder what a novel by that voice might be like, could anyone blame Wolfe for being tempted? Just think about it: the master, unfettered...his wicked intelligence, his vaunted powers of observation...unconstrained...a big book...an important book....

Deny it if you will!

Wolfe's plunge into novel writing came accompanied by an eight-thousand-word literary manifesto (in the November 1989 Harper's), "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast." With typical brio, the essay asserted that the raucous complexity of America had overwhelmed a generation of writers. Writing programs across the land were cranking out "young people with serious literary ambitions [who] were no longer interested in the metropolis or any other big, rich slices of contemporary life." Minimalism, metafiction, magical realism, and other innovations were actually safe refuges, cul de sacs where our novelists could "avert their eyes" from the roaring challenge of American reality. To rectify the sorry state of affairs, Wolfe looked back for inspiration to the titans of realism-to Sinclair Lewis, and to Balzac and Zola, writers he credited with the novel's highest fulfillment, "a true and powerful picture of individuals in society." If that sounded like the nineteenth century talking, so much the better. Against modernism's emphasis on psychological states, interiority, and the writer-as-creator, Wolfe stressed objectivity, society, and the writer-as- recorder. This last was crucial. Our novelists had to stop dreaming and start...interviewing! Conjuring Zola tramping into coal mines and Lewis at Chatauqua meetings, "doggedly taking notes on five-by-eight cards," Wolfe urged "a highly detailed realism based on reporting" that would once again give America "a literature worthy of her vastness." Thus the man who had revived journalism by infusing it with fiction would now save fiction by handing novelists pencil and notebook and shoving them out the door. And when no one volunteered to go first, Wolfe manfully stepped to the plate and took a whack at it himself.

ell, two novels have sailed over the fence so far, and as advertised, they are big. Bonfire of the Vanities weighed in at 659 pages, and the current opus, A Man in Full (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, $28.95)-another saga of a wealthy overreacher stretched on the rack of modern American life-runs to 742. A Man in Full charts the ruin of Charlie Croker, an aging Georgia Tech gridiron-hero-cum- highly-leveraged-Atlanta-business-king, beset by creditors eyeing his office tower, jet, and twenty-nine-thousand-acre quail-hunting plantation. Wolfe propels toward him the current star of Tech's football team, Fareek Fanon, black and poor and soon to be charged with date raping the (rich white) daughter of Croker's best friend, a major player in Atlanta's business elite. The city's (black) mayor, meanwhile, faces reelection worries and a looming race crisis. And also meanwhile...in distant California, a hard-working Croker Foods employee loses his job and begins a harrowing odyssey that by strange twists of fate will bring him...guess where? Toss in assorted trophy wives, scavenging lawyers, and lavish mansions, and away we go. It's a sprawling plot built on headline themes, race and sex and money and politics-a meganovel crammed to bursting with all that is sensational in American life.

As for the promised realistic detail, A Man in Full has scads of it: trade terms from "debt defalcation" to "Peel yo cap!"; the demographics of each Atlanta neighborhood; and endless descriptions of decor. Where Balzac believed that rooms reveal their occupants, Wolfe outdoes him, giving us "burled tupelo maple" and "cruciform mullions," "ogee curves" and "white industrial muntins"- architecture as erotica. His reporter's notebook, meanwhile, yields well- researched set pieces, including a wildly technical-and X-rated-scene in which Croker's prize stallion is put to stud before a group of astonished weekend guests. Wolfe's goal was to "take real life and spread it across the pages of a book"; and to the extent that real life means knowing how loan officers choreograph their intimidation of a delinquent $300-million borrower, or how the pickers operate their tuggers in the freezer unit of a food wholesaler, he succeeds brilliantly.

But what of the real, inner lives of men and women? A Man in Full displays a repertoire of bravura emotional effects, from the rage of the mighty at finding their power challenged, to the chewy misery of coveting someone else's house, wife, life. But in lull moments, Wolfe's people are made to say-and think-most unlikely things. Listen to the mayor of Atlanta, stumping for civic harmony: "Nothing, least of all a vile canard like that, should be allowed to tear this city asunder...." Or an arriviste African-American lawyer dismayed by the excesses of a black college-student party: "Brothers! Sisters! Is this why you've become the jeunesse doree of Black America?" French has always served Wolfe as a trusty marker of luxury and pretension. It's one thing to season your essays with piquant mots justes, however, and another to have backwoods, Georgia-Cracker Cap'm Charlie Croker thinking them ("Aw, this was esprit de l'escalier stuff, as the French say"). Impartially Wolfe spreads around his own pet phrases. Here's Charlie, recalling courting his second wife: "She made him feel like a kid, like a twenty-year-old in the season of the rising sap." Conrad, the Croker Foods employee, ruing an unhappy marriage: "He was only twenty-three! Still in the season of the rising sap!" Coach Buck McNutter on his star's indiscretions: "You get some kid twenty or twenty-one years old, and he's in the season of the rising sap...." Such echoes sound like telltale signs of a writer's impatience at having to differentiate his characters, both from each other and from himself.

ensational themes and plot, scandals in opulent settings, interchangeable characters-has Wolfe committed a novel that, to borrow a phrase, does not rise to the level of art? Writing in the New Yorker, John Updike judged A Man in Full "entertainment, not literature," while Norman Mailer, in the New York Review of Books, called it an "adroit commercial counterfeit," designed for those who like their heroes pure, their plots sentimental, and their protagonists' thoughts cozily predictable. "Mega-bestseller readers," Mailer observes, "do not want to ponder any truly unexpected revelations. Reality might lie out there, but that is not why they are reading." He accuses Wolfe of cynically dumbing-down his novel-"writing a bestseller with conscious intent."

As an example of how A Man in Full can be, to quote Mailer, "so good and so empty all at once," consider Wolfe's treatment of Raymond Peepgass, a loan officer involved in the unraveling of Charlie Croker. His own life in chaos (nasty separation, dead-end career), Raymond concocts a risky, illegal scheme to acquire Croker properties cheap through foreclosure. Eager to enlist Croker's embittered ex-wife, Martha, in funding the scam, he drives out to her lavish house. And what do we get when Wolfe takes us inside his character at this fateful juncture? A catalogue of Martha's wealth, and how agog our man is at it. A "silver tray with gadrooned edges" [!!]; saucers with handles "designed in flamboyant swoops"; the Georg Jensen silverware; and on and on. "Viscerally he could sense how much the sugar bowl, a mere sugar bowl, must have cost, which was in fact $1,250....The luxury of it all coursed through Peepgass's central nervous system...." In Mailer's indictment, this Peepgass-in-paradise bit would seem to be one of those smoking-gun moments when Wolfe opts for entertainment over literature-a mega-bestselling author turning the scene into "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" (complete with brand names and price tags) while turning his back, as Mailer charges, to "the real complexity of men and women."

Or maybe...Wolfe doesn't believe in that kind of complexity. To be sure, what made fans slaver at the thought of Wolfe-as-novelist was partly a premonition of how well his wicked insights into people would play as fiction. And yet the hilarious sketches tossed off in such essays as "The Me Decade" (Germaine Greer in a London restaurant, setting fire to her hair out of boredom!) were the opposite of novelistic, a kind of blitzkrieg caricature. "The Me Decade" was not fiction, but pop sociology with a satirical thrust. It had a thesis-that American prosperity had exploded old restraints, igniting an indulgent religion of the self-and if certain techniques of fiction came into play (irony, interior monologue, vivid description), it was to push the thesis. Similarly, reducing Leonard Bernstein in "Radical Chic" to a mass of liberal contradictions was not a portrayal of a man but a pathology report on the times. Wolfe's satiric/diagnostic reduction of individuals to symptoms made for brilliant cultural criticism. But a novel-especially the old-fashioned realist novel he pledged in his Harper's essay to write, that dealt in "what truly presses upon the heart of the individual"-requires the whole person.

Wolfe doesn't write the whole person. Tellingly, his Harper's essay proposes "status traits modified by personality" as the key to writing characters: a "technique," he says, for "portraying the innermost life of the individual." The formulation suggests a writer interested less in people themselves than in people illuminated, or revealed, in the light of an idea. Status is Wolfe's great subject, his raison d'ecriver. It lay behind "Radical Chic" and "The Me Decade"; and his later writings about art and architecture are really exposes of status maneuvers in the professions of art and architecture. Indeed, his career has consisted in playing a hundred jazzy variations on the homey theme of keeping up with the Joneses.

No other writer-living or dead-can touch Wolfe on his subject. What his characters wear, what they drive (or wish they drove), where they went to school (or didn't), how much they earn (and why it's never enough), their beer of choice, music of choice, living room furniture of choice: he engages the hermeneutics of status with the crazed comprehensiveness of an idiot savant (or a Ph.D. from Yale). So too the narcissism, megalomania, and general churning anxiety that comprise the personal pathology of status. A Man in Full begins with Charlie Croker on his plantation on a sunny winter Saturday, breathing in "the resinous air of the pines." Before too many more breaths, his pleasure has yielded to a bolder satisfaction in reflecting that "every square inch of it, every beast that moved on it...was his, Cap'm Charlie Croker's." Ineluctably, Wolfe's characters skid toward the bottom line, converting love and beauty, art and nature, into assets in the ceaseless calculus of status. It amuses, it appalls.

But real life spread across the pages of a book?

The nineteenth-century realism Wolfe reveres was partly a revolt against the insipid conventions of romance ("the old trade of make-believe," wrote William Dean Howells, "that pamper[s] our gross appetite for the marvelous"), and partly an attempt to keep pace with the successes of nineteenth-century materialism. Zola's influential 1880 essay, "The Experimental Novel," grounded literary naturalism in diagnosis, casting the writer as an observer of fixed laws of nature and society, rather than a mere poetic mystifier. Human nature was not some free-floating emanation, after all, but an interplay of instinct and environment. This new emphasis sought to bring literature in line with science, dispensing with ladies and lakes and noble Indians in the woods, and clearing the way for serious projects such as Zola's study of five generations of the Rougon-Macquart family. It was an intuition that the hazy fancifying of a Walter Scott or a Fenimore Cooper would not do in the age of Darwin and Marx.

Here Wolfe presents an odd mishmash. Brazenly A Man in Full flouts the realist pitch for things to occur in novels-the words are Henry James's-"as they occur in life, where the manner of a great many of them is not to occur at all." In Wolfe, everything occurs. (And the more marvelous, the better, including a character sprung from prison by a timely earthquake.) Yet beneath the razzle- dazzle surface lies a relentless naturalism, one that seizes the novel as a forum for illustrating certain theses on human nature and society. Though Wolfe cites Lewis, Balzac, and Zola, the deeper animating presences behind A Man in Full are not novelists at all, but scientists-Darwin and, above all, Thorstein Veblen.

That Veblen merits no mention in the Harper's essay suggests one of those influences too fundamental to disclose or even, perhaps, to see. Veblen extracted from the function of wealth in modern society a keen and durable insight: acquiring things is not, as was conventionally believed, about consuming them, but rather about showing them. Ownership was a "mark of prowess," he wrote; "visible success... an end sought for its own utility as a basis of esteem." And though Howells reviewed The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) as a biting satire of fin de siecle wealth, Veblen had something far broader in mind, an evolutionary interpretation of modern life. Social organization was-as ever-tribal and hierarchical, and his terms for it darkly atavistic: "the warrior and the hunter" prowling a "predatory culture" in which "any effort that does not involve an assertion of prowess comes to be unworthy of the man...." Wealth as an assertive show of force was the central drama of modern society.

It's no exaggeration to say that these ideas form a complete blueprint for A Man in Full. Wolfe's tone is merry where Veblen's was mordant, but his terms are identical. His novel pursues the predatory-culture argument tirelessly. We are shown Charlie Croker out hunting; relaxing in his Gun House, its walls festooned with shotguns and boars' heads; wrestling a rattlesnake before awed admirers. We observe hierarchy-display behavior, both dominant (Charlie, who "showed the room his omnipotent deltoids and latissimi dorsi, which bulged beneath his shirt") and submissive (Martha's milquetoast escort, dissolving when they run into Charlie-"a big submissive grin came over his face, and he began blurting out pleasantries"). And if we still don't get it, characters help out, like teachers at the blackboard, as when Peepgass's scheme sparks in Martha this rumination: "He now seemed...more of a man. He was no Charlie, but he had Charlie's passion for the deal, which was perhaps where the contemporary male's passion for battle went these days."

o my ear, this and many similar passages ("A quail shoot was a ritual in which the male of the species acted out his role of hunter, provider, and protector...") sound less like the calculated simplicities of a mega-bestseller than the stilted attempts of an evolutionary psychologist moonlighting as novelist. Life is status, and status is (male) power: Wolfe turns his novel into Gray's Anatomy to bring this idea home. "He was a mountain of flesh...." "His mighty neck swelled out until it seemed to merge with his trapezii in one continuous slope to the shoulders." "He rolled his massive shoulders, he flexed his neck up and down...." "His neck fanned out wider than his ears and merged with a pair of trapezius muscles that sloped like his native Balkar Dagh Mountains down to his shoulders." "His neck, trapezii, shoulders, and chest, as well as his upper arms, seemed to swell out to a prodigious size...." "He was so massive through the back and shoulders, the seat seemed incapable of containing him." "He was so big, his fingertips reached almost from one end of the couch to the other."

Writing like this has dispensed not merely with "what presses upon the heart of the individual," but with the individual himself - these sentences actually describe seven different characters in A Man in Full (and can you guess which is a horse?). It suggests that what attracted Wolfe to the idea of realism wasn't "the metropolis" or "the heart of the individual" but a literary determinism, born in nineteenth-century literature's science envy, which turns a novel into a shooting gallery for someone armed, as he is, with an all-encompassing thesis about what makes people tick. For while Wolfe-to borrow Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction-may look like the fox, sly and quick and knowing many things, secretly he's a hedgehog of a novelist, burrowing ever deeper into his One Big Idea. "He leaned forward with his huge forearms on the table and the testosterone flowing." "They sat with their thighs ajar in an athletic sprawl, as if they were bulging with so much testosterone they couldn't have closed their legs if they tried." A Man in Full is the production of an extravagant, radical materialism. Deeper and deeper Wolfe digs, implacably-almost desperately-reducing his characters: to the things they own and covet, the things they wear, and finally to the muscle and hormones that they are.

Two-thirds of the way through Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe inserted a revealing philosophical aside about an Amazon tribe who believe that "there is no such thing as a private self."

The Bororos regard the mind as an open cavity...in which the entire village dwells and the jungle grows. In 1969 Jose M. R. Delgado, the eminent Spanish brain physiologist, pronounced the Bororos correct. For nearly three millennia, Western philosophers had viewed the self as something unique, something encased inside each person's skull, so to speak....At the core of one's self there was presumed to be something irreducible and inviolate. Not so, said Delgado. "Each person is a transitory composite of materials borrowed from the environment."... He cited experiments in which healthy college students lying on beds in well-lit but soundproofed chambers, wearing gloves to reduce the sense of touch and translucent goggles to block out specific sights, began to hallucinate within hours. Without the entire village, the whole jungle, occupying the cavity, they had no minds left.

What is the innermost life of the individual when the individual has, by definition, no inner life? As it turns out, the "empty" quality of A Man in Full is not, as Mailer argued, a sell-out, but a philosophical position. If we begin to get the stealthily dreary feeling that Wolfe's characters are not individuals but types, whose complexity lies largely in what they wear, buy, and covet, it's because Wolfe himself believes it. Believing it may make him a perfect writer for our time and place - the ultimate Material Boy for an America where invisible, databank-sifting marketers craft enticements tailored to your "personal" and "individual" desires. Who is this "you" they seem to know so well? He's a Tom Wolfe character.

Finally, it's tantalizing to consider that the mega-bestseller may issue not from cynical or mindless pandering, but rather the opposite, with its ideal author a covertly ideological one, in dedicated thrall to an idea. In Hollywood, the term for narratives pitchable in a single sentence and characters reducible to a single motivation is "high-concept." But doesn't that also describe Wolfe's fiction, this novelization of Veblen and Darwin, in which writing is a matter of "technique" driven by a theory, and characters who might develop interesting resistances to an author's intentions are nowhere to be found?

In this light Wolfe himself seems an evolutionary marvel. A closet ideologue with a lively voice and rollicking sense of humor-that's a killer adaptation in an environment where screenplays and film rights deliver maximum long-term push to your gene pool. In A Man in Full it makes for darkly manic comedy, but also a surprising heavy-handedness, and an underlying take on human possibility bleak enough that even a chuckling reader might leave the novel wishing for an author whose black bag held not just status yardstick but stethoscope, to take the pulse of characters forlornly crying, Where's the rest of me? n