A Man in Full

...his favorite composer is Stravinsky...

...The prison house of Santa Rita might almost be a description of a gladiators' training school in Antiquity or a Roman galley full of slaves...

...77 iation of Charlie by his bankers, of Martha by Charlie's re-marriage, etc...

...He increases the pressure on Charlie by seizing his jet, and he sets about recruiting a secret consortium of purchasers, including himself...

...He cannot confide in his second wife, Serena, from whom he grows increasingly remote as his troubles worsen...

...Wealth and position are all...

...Honor is, of course, an Old South agrarian preoccupation, not to say obsession...

...And the bankers look forward to breaking down the will and self-respect of those whom they earlier flattered and wheedled to take the money...

...He refuses, and instead staves off the bank for a while by cutting the workforce at his national chain of refrigerated food warehouses by fifteen percent...

...Yardley's interpretation is therefore the theory advanced here in negative...

...Peepgas himself is less attracted to Martha than to her lifestyle...

...This conclusion must be qualified: There are hints that Mr...

...Drilled with the notion that art is confrontational, and that bigotry is a breach of etiquette, they seem not to notice the homoeroticism...

...Manliness cannot provide it since, in Santa Rita, that is a synonym for dog-eat-dog brutality...

...A man even in prison is free, provided he gives assent to the injustices he suffers...

...very many will have recourse to it in the collective loyalties of tribe and race...

...More to the point, he has already assured Armholster of his loyalty and support...

...He has never "released the red dog" that is in him and every man...

...The son of feckless hippie parents contemptuous of bourgeois values, Conrad saw at first hand what Samuel Butler merely theorized in Erewhon: that those who disparage respectability as a tepid imitation of virtue are the very people who cannot meet its unexacting standards...

...My leg you will chain — yes, but my will—no, not even Zeus can conquer that...

...It derives its hard cynical charge from the fact that most people in most ages feel a natural concern about their reputation both in their own eyes and in those of the world...

...Wolfe takes characters of different backgrounds and social standing and traces how each of them pursues (and sometimes radically alters) his own concept of honor in a society that no longer offers them either compass or stars to steer by...

...But this serves only to confirm Martha's fear that a ruined man is still a more substantial social presence than a comfortably-off single woman...

...As a result, he hardly seems to realize that he is facing ruin, having been accused of (though not formally charged with) the rape of the daughter of Inman Armholster, one of the first five names in anyone's list of the Atlanta white business establishment (and, not coincidentally, a close friend of Charlie Croker...

...modern and post-modern relativist philosophies went on to deconstruct them...

...The result is that, as a significant minor character tells Conrad: "Life's about cruelty and intimidation...

...Poverty and powerlessness are contemptible...

...Charlie senses at once that he can never accept the deal...

...Finally, in an act of existential defiance, she hosts It is a civilization so bored and complacent that it invites racist gangs to teach it freedom...

...Conrad helps the wretched prison rape victim even though Epictetus seems to suggest that there is no point in helping people who have brought ill-fortune down upon themselves...

...As both sides know, that would publicly drag Charlie down from his social peak to the less than human status of a loan defaulter (in the brutal language of the bankers, "s-- thead...

...There is no longer any unifying set of religious or philosophical ideals to hold people together...

...And if not Charlie, who else in the novel...

...JOHN O'SULLIVAN is editor at large for National Review...

...In the first PlannersBanc session, Peepgas and his colleagues strive not merely to persuade Charlie to arrange the sensible repayment of his loan, but to strip him of all dignity in front of his own aides...

...It is, however, the comic set-piece at the Atlanta Museum banquet which best captures the end of civilization theme...

...Wolfe —will be huddled down in the Catacombs, praying over the standards of a better time and waiting patiently for the Goths and Vandals to move on, as they have always done before, when the money runs out...

...It is a picture of a civilization so bored and confident of its own invulnerability that it invites the Nordic Bund and the Black Guerrilla Family inside to ask for lessons in freedom...

...Yet, despite himself, he admires the defiance of white establishment opinion that the "Ram Yo' Booty" scene represents...

...Unlike Charlie, he has never shown the boldness in commerce that might win him the honor of success and would be a sort of honor in itself...

...Wolfe is not, of course, as didactic as my interpretative summary may make him appear...

...Roger Too White is a successful black lawyer who, on our first introduction to him, is watching with mixed feelings as a group of black rich kids on Spring Break proceed to halt the Atlanta traffic with an impromptu dance display to the tune of "Ram Yo' Booty" under the scandalized eyes of the white establishment...

...and a few—including, I suspect, Mr...

...But manliness as an ideal has no relevance to Martha and little to Charlie who has it in plenty but becomes preoccupied with different aspects of his honor...

...With the stakes so high on both sides, he is understandably—but uncharacteristically—indecisive...

...But there are other visions of honor explored in the novel through the experiences of Conrad and Roger Too White...

...Has he cut himself off, perhaps, from his own people...

...But Epictetus is in fact far more central to the novel than this criticism allows...

...a desire to acquire it drives both Conrad and Peepgas in their very different ways...

...Conrad's rapid social descent thereafter soon lands him in the Santa Rita prison which, like many prisons, is run by the inmates—or, more precisely, by some of the inmates organized into racist gangs with names like the Nordic Bund, the Black Guerrilla Family, and Nuestra Familia...

...Respectability is no guide to Conrad here...

...It was to such a post-civilized world that Epictetus preached Stoicism two millennia ago, and Wolfe may well judge by comparison that today's post-Christian America is about in line for a revival of Stoicism...

...Taken together, these qualities amount to a pagan aristocratic sort of honor...

...Indeed, since that etiquette is an obstacle to describing the American scene in all its extravagant racial, ethnic, and sexual heterogeneity, it is a target of Wolfe's writing rather than an influence upon it...

...Charlie, whom The American Spectator • January 1999 67 trouble has made alert, hisses, but no one notices except a socialite woman who is affronted by such bigotry...

...How Charlie then regains his honor, the perverse personal and political consequences of this, and what happens to him and all the other characters are mysteries I will leave concealed behind the arras of Mr...

...Driven on by his own predicament, he is now given the opportunity by Charlie's The American Trollope devotes a major novel to the theme of honor in multicultural America...

...As this century limps to its end, honor has migrated to the outer limits of genre writing or the great parables of anti-totalitarian dissident literature, Anglo-American literature graduating meanwhile from assaulting the heroic to cultivating the suburban...

...It inspires them to perform decent, even heroic, acts and restrains them from selfish or ignoble ones...

...His New South concern for possessions gets in the way of his Old South concerns for loyalty and friendship...

...and he dislikes the manufactured term "African-American...

...Although billions are moved around at his say-so, he is paid a mere $130,000 a year...

...Social rules and customs are traditionally supposed to protect us from these human wolves...

...But her guests talk blithely past her...

...But he cannot bring himself to reject out of hand an offer that would save Croker Global...

...Tribal honor, when satisfied, can be surprisingly satisfying...

...But what happens when such rules decay...

...Then a mistake by a bookstore sends him a compilation of writings by the Stoics, notably Epictetus, a Greek philosopher in Roman Antiquity, who having been a prisoner himself, seems to speak directly to Conrad: "Chain me...

...If there is to be honor in the multicultural ruins of Christian civilization, it will be based on a number of conflicting ideals...

...John Podhoretz in the Weekly Standard, for instance, argues that the book is about manliness...

...If this really were a Dickensian novel, it would not be Epictetus but Christ who served to inspire Conrad and save Charlie...

...That sum would be inadequate in itself, but it shrinks still further when much of it is siphoned off to pay the legal bills and extra rent required since his wife threw him out because of an affair with a Finnish popsie...

...It is curious that so much of modern literature, which traditionally has had moral as well as aesthetic purposes, has embraced the viewpoint of the man without honor...

...And indeed, the society that emerges from A Man in Full is extraordinarily like Rome after Augustus—rich, extravagant, diverse, multicultural, open to talent, and cruel...

...In such circumstances, the accusation of dishonorable conduct inevitably loses its sting and the dishonorable prosper...

...B ut the basic theme of the novel seems to have been a mystery to most of its reviewers...

...others like Martha will base it on their station...

...yet others will seek it in possessions and social status like Serena, or even modest success like Raymond Peepgas...

...he sees that she might be insurance against the collapse of his scheme...

...Disgusted by their example, Conrad embraced its opposite...

...Here are Atlanta's wealthiest and most conservative citizens, all table-hopping frenetically, under two vast paintings of naked male prisoners yearning romantically for each other...

...The carnage of the First World War supposedly discredited honor and such related virtues as patriotism and manliness...

...But the prim shell is Western civilization and the final destination of the racial solidarity that Roger embraces is the Santa Rita prison writ large...

...We are, so to speak, honor-bound...

...As RTW re-assesses his own honor, however, he is setting about subverting Charlie's...

...From that point on, Charlie is torn between two concepts of honor that he has run in tandem until now...

...She, meanwhile, has troubles of her own...

...The most common criticism, however, was that (in the words of Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times) "the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, of all people, is introduced as a crude deus ex machina cum self-help guru to provide this thick Dickensian novel with an abrupt unsatisfying ending...

...Worse, when Charlie and Serena pass by, they cluster around them...

...In scene after scene Wolfe depicts a post-Christian America sloughing off thecivilized restraints we have until recently taken for granted...

...And so it has continued...

...With these thoughts still in his head, he arrives at a meeting where he is asked to embrace tribal honor in its least attractive form...

...With the best will in the world, he is almost destined to regard honorable men and women as so many sheep waiting to be sheared...

...He can exploit our virtues as well as our vices...

...Surely his difficulties arise from the fact that he is both Old South and New South wrapped up together...

...And it is there, working as a male nurse, that he is hired to help Charlie convalesce after his knee operation...

...John Updike, in an interesting New Yorker review, praised Roger Too White as Wolfe's most sympathetic character because he "manages in the end to unbutton his prim shell and reclaim solidarity with his own people...

...Beneath these trappings, however, the skids are under him...

...S uddenly, however, Charlie is offered a lifeline by an unlikely ally...

...And there is a fatalistic and austere self-interestin Stoicism which, however suitable as a response to the post-Christian cruelties described here, does not travel well sub specie aeternitatis...

...At the dinner she is approached by Raymond Peepgas who hopes to recruit her for his consortium...

...He dislikes Fareek, seeing in him a cruder version of his own young self made more arrogant by the collapse of such light social restraints as good The American Spectator • January 1999 65 manners, and thinks he is probably guilty...

...Or when there is such a multicultural proliferation of them that no one feels confident in asserting any particular set as binding on all...

...And soon they are holding hands at a charity concert...

...Charlie's predicament is made worse by the absence of a helpmeet...

...What makes this An Event as much as a novel is that I Wolfe is the major Amer( ican writer least constrained by liberal etiquette on sensitive questions...

...Finally, Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post thought that the novel's real theme was "humiliation" --the humil44 There are hints that Wolfe does not regard Stoicism as the last word—merely the next...

...So an underlying theme might forgivably get misinterpreted in all the glorious confusion...

...One of the bankers harassing Charlie, Raymond Peepgas, is a man beneath honor, an intelligent but essentially passive executive whose career prospects have ground to a halt...

...and feminism completed the job by `\ exposing their role in upholding an oppressive patriarchy...

...Acting as Fareek's attorney (but in reality as the mayor's political agent), he approaches Charlie with an offer: PlannersBanc will reschedule Charlie's loans on a favorable basis if he will attend a press conference and say, merely, that as a former sportsman himself, he understands the pressures on young athletes, and it is important that Fareek be given a fair hearing if accused of anything (not that he is accused of anything in particular, of course...

...But humiliation is simply honor seen from outside in difficult circumstances...

...And if we should act ignobly, then conscience rebukes us...

...Of course, they are drawn by rumors of Charlie's impending doom...

...Some like Conrad and Charlie may root it in a philosophy like Stoicism...

...If Charlie could be persuaded to hand over Croker Concourse to PlannersBanc in settlement of his debts, Peepgas might be able to steer its subsequent sale to a favored buyer at a knock-down price...

...He has a European soul: He wears impeccably tailored English suits...

...But even before 1914, novels and plays had begun to be written in which a rational, self-conscious, and essentially selfish hero mocks the noble pretensions of a subordinate character who himself would have been the hero of plays written twenty years before...

...He does so only in response to a personal plea by Atlanta's shrewd black mayor, his old Morehouse friend Wes Jordan, that he represent Fareek in a way that will preserve Atlanta's racial harmony...

...Thus inspired, Conrad helps a wretched victim of rape and then, challenged, beats the boy's rapist, the leader of the Nordic Bund, to a bloody pulp...

...Fareek "the Cannon" Fanon is Georgia Tech's all-American football star...

...A cross America in Oakland, Conrad Hensley is being forced to reevaluate his own hard-bought ideas of honor...

...He seeks to compensate for his dithering here with boldness elsewhere, and inevitably makes a series of social blunders...

...But does Charlie represent the Old South...

...Wolfe's last chapter...

...But partial deliverance is at hand...

...He is heavily mortgaged, individually and corporately, to PlannersBanc for loans it made to finance a vast white elephant office development on the edge of Atlanta, hubristically named Croker Concourse...

...Being Roger Less White, it seems, has its rewards...

...As RTW proceeds with it, however, he discovers a growing racial disharmony within and about himself...

...He has all the trappings of worldly honor —a young trophy second wife, Serena, a corporate jet for a chariot, and a large plantation-estate, Turpmtine, where he shoots quail, impresses guests with the Old Southern splendor of his hospitality, and has the black servants address him as "Cap'm Charlie...

...Wolfe does not regard Epictetus and Stoicism as the last word—merely the next word...

...She continues to experience the unbearable lightness of being a former wife with no present social role and responsibilities, thus socially invisible...

...A man without honor cannot be humiliated almost by definition—see Bill Clinton passim...

...Hence the significance when Tom Wolfe, the American Trollope, a writer both realistic and satirical, who paints on thevast panoramic canvas of American society, devotes a major new novel to the theme of honor in multicultural America...

...Charlie also has a strong Southern sense of personal honor: he prides 64 January 1999 • The American Spectator himself on his physique ("a back as strong as a Jersey Bull at nearly sixty"), his personal bravery, and his loyalty to friends...

...But that is in line with other great social trends of the century...

...Shaw even went to the extreme of making the hero of Arms and the Man a Swiss...

...Oig 68 January 1999 • The American Spectator...

...When he makes an unintended (and instantly regretted) race-baiting gibe about the white business establishment at a press conference called to defend Fareek, he finds himself not only applauded by black neighbors and politicians, but also discreetly thanked by his white-shoe law partners for rescuing their firm from terminal respectability...

...And the softening effect of Christianity on Western civilization is gradually fading into history...

...Has he elevated a concept of honor as personal cultural refinement above the honor of tribe...

...He is the slaveof respectability who has married his pregnant girlfriend, is saving for a mortgage on a modest suburban home, and supports his family by working long hours in the harsh conditions of a refrigerated food warehouse—until he is fired when Charlie cuts the workforce by 15 percent rather than lose his corporate jet and estate...

...He expresses Good 01' Boy opinions on art and homosexuality within unsympathetic liberal hearing and he deals out an anti-Semitic slip of the tongue to a Jewish businessman whom he had hoped to entice into renting Croker Concourse...

...That makes him a marked man, the future victim of the Bund's revenge...

...He tries to escape from his plight by retreating to the hospital for a knee operation, avoiding RTW's phone calls, and hoping absurdly that death will deliver him from dishonor...

...Even his quail-hunting plantation is written off against taxes as an agricultural research farm...

...Since the bank has the rights to Charlie's properties if he defaults, presumably not...

...But there is more to this than mere money...

...For that reason the man who rises above honor by sinking below it, like Gould, has an advantage over the rest of us...

...Charlie Croker is the Man in Full of the title, or at least he thinks he is when the book opens...

...Sensing that there is a strength in Conrad that he himself now lacks, Charlie confides in him about the proposed Fareek-PlannersBanc swap and, after a long 66 January 1999 • The American Spectator night of discussion, is converted to Stoicism...

...As the fateful press conference draws near, he falls into a passive despair...

...So he agrees to consider it...

...Tribal loyalties are the only ties to be relied on...

...Human dignity is trampled on at all levels...

...Now, manliness is certainly one component in a man's honor...

...The bankers propose that Charlie sell the treasured symbols of his worldly honor, in particular his corporate jet and the Turpmtine estate...

...The president of the United States, surfing along on great waves of personal shamelessness and public indulgence, comes to mind...

...And the remark has not lost its power to shock and amuse...

...1 (at colossal expense) a table at the major annual Social Arts dinner— a wonderfully Wolfish set-piece in which Atlanta's conservative social elite honor a pre-war artist whose homoerotic paintings of men in prison have recently been unearthed...

...then Zeus intervenes in the form of an earthquake, and Conrad escapes from Santa Rita...

...Aloof, monosyllabic, and dripping with jewelry, Fareek combines the wary social hostility of someone who has climbed out of a crack ghetto with the cold arrogant condescension of the football hero who is denied nothing...

...Is this necessary...

...It is a terrifying Inferno of brutality, racial hatred, and homosexual rape, bearing little relation to the homoerotic prison art being celebrated in Atlanta...

...She is no longer invited to parties, and old friends pass her by without noticing her presence...

...And when the museum's new director, Jonathan Myrer, delivers a speech, laced with clichés from Foucault, denouncing the conventions of Western civilization as akin to the walls of prison, the audience takes it all in with the same bland complacency with which it had ignored the paintings...

...predicament to release the red dog...

...She tries to establish an independent existence in the currently approved ways—joining an Amazonian feminist group and attending exercise class in the hope of better approaching the new feminine fashion icon: "perfect boys with breasts...

...Roger Too White is reluctant to take on the case...

...Charlie begins to realize that he had relied on his first wife, Martha, more than he knew...

...All to no avail...

...Charlie is a wealthy Atlanta property developer and a former sports star ("the Sixty Minute Man") still recognized at airports...

...Michael Lewis in the New York Times thought that the novel was about "the decline of Old South agrarian values...

...The anti-hero had been born, though he would not be christened for some time...

...The nearest things to virtue there are crude parodies of manliness and loyalty—a macho brutality and racist gang warfare...

...he is half-amused, half-shocked to discover Yoruba carvings in the office of the mayor of Atlanta (whom he knows to have at best an ironic regard for "Roots" causes...

...But a business culture, freed from the restraints of Christian charity, has adopted techniques that owe more to gladiatorial combat than to profit-maximization...

...Through the good offices of a friend from Charlie's refrigerated warehouse, Conrad now embarks on a long journey across America through the new immigrant railway—an Asian-Latino underworld with its own organizations, forged credentials, low-rent accommodations, and illegal networks—to Atlanta...

...Peepgas is presentable enough, and when they meet at a restaurant to discuss Charlie's bankruptcy and the threat it represents to Martha's alimony, friends finally concede her presence and come over to chat...

...loyalty to friends to reject it...

...It is a fatal error...

...Honor Amid the Ruins A Man in Full Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus & Giroux 742 pages / $28.95 REVIEWED BY John O'Sullivan „ othing has been lost save honor,” said the great nineteenth-century swindler Jay Gould about one of his failed enterprises...

...What really irks Peep-gas, however, is his own timidity...

...As his nickname implies —Roger Too White is Roger White II inverted by his classmates in Morehouse College, the forcing-house of Atlanta's black elite—he is "a half-beige brother" with a sense of honor that is acute but uncertain...

...He is a man who will fight for himself, his possessions and his standing in the world, meet his obligations, and succor friends...

...Besides, any general sympathy for Roger must be qualified by the fact that the only positive action he performs in the novel is a vigorous attempt to bribe Charlie to lie in a rape case...

...Wolfe's choice of Stoicism as the means to salvation indicates that the modern America he describes here is closer in spirit to pre-Christian Rome than to any period between now and then...

...Without a male arm to lean on, she has become socially invisible...

...And what little shreds of personal dignity he has left will shortly be torn away when the sordid details of this liaison emerge in open court in the paternity suit brought by this former girlfriend (whom he now hates but for whom he still lusts...

...And A Man in Full is rich in brilliant set-pieces, his usual scalpel-like social observation, fine parodies ranging from rap to Foucault-speak, superb fictionalized reporting from the prison and the immigrant underworld, and the fizziest prose around...

...Marriage is an honorable estate —the only available honorable estate for a woman like her...

...Wealth and social position urge him to go through with the deal...

...But his plan, of course, requires that Charlie's plight continue to worsen...

...And when Serena does tender dramatic information that would justify Charlie testifying for Fareek, it is sufficiently in her interest to make Charlie (and the reader) doubt it...

...This is what seems to have happened even in some of the more perceptive and interesting reviews...

...besides, convicted of a felony even if unjustly, he has lost respectability for life and needs a more elemental basis for his sense of honor...

...This is now hemorrhaging money, and the bank is demanding that Charlie should liquidate some of his assets to meet their bills...

...and Roger Too White's conversion to tribal loyalty from a Western Civ aestheticism is in part a conversion to a more masculine ideal of honor...

...It is an environment utterly lacking in humanity, fellow-feeling, mercy, or kindness...