Wolfe's Noble Animal
ALLEN, BROOKE
Writers & Writing WOLFE'S NOBLE ANIMAL By Brooke Allen Halfway through Tom Wolfe's latest opus I found myself thinking how wonderful, how positively luxurious, it was to read a big, witty...
...Guided by Epictetus, he performs the labors of a modern Hercules, descending into the underworld, killing the hydra, cleaning the Augean stables...
...Fashionable Atlanta has become politically correct like the rest of fashionable America...
...If you read all the magazine articles about Charlie Croker, reflects a jealous acquaintance, "'you had to endure constant references to the piney woods, the swamps, hunting, fishing, horses, snakes, raccoons, wild boars, infantry combat, football, and a lot of other Southern Manhood stuff...
...Nobody speaks or thinks for the author...
...Tom Wolfe has said that his inspiration comes from places and settings rather than characters...
...The old name seemed to the directors "too stodgy, too slow-footed, too old-fashioned, and, above all, too Old South...
...To Charlie, the museum director's Foucaultian spiel is crazy, but the paintings are far, far worse, especially An-angement in Red Clay, depicting two prisoners ogling each other in aditeli, naked from the waist down...
...Worse, Charlie stands to lose the two things that mean the most to him: his N. C. Wyeth painting of Jim Bowie at the Alamo (with whom, it need hardly be said, Charlie identifies), and Turpmtine itself, the one place where he feels "elemental...
...The very sight of the freezer pickers, who might be described as the modern equivalent of cotton pickers or pulp mill workers, depresses Charlie: "This guy comes out of the freezer unit, and he's got two icicles hanging out of his nose...
...Wolfe cannot resist, of course, having fun at the expense of Atlanta's business-friendly motto, "We're the city that's too busy to hate...
...Like anyone who sees his most basic assumptions about propriety being flouted, he looked to the people around him for confirmation of the righteousness of his objections...
...a man...
...To nail down his argument, he brings in the heavy artillery of that literary nonpareil, Henry James...
...Updike is right, of course...
...there is not much introspection...
...If a comparison were necessary it might be said that Tom Wolfe is to Updike as Art Spiegelman or R. Crumb are to Jackson Pollock...
...Turpmtine] had paid for itself many times over in terms of bagged pigeons...
...which is to say, he was no longer merely a real estate developer, he was...
...still, the decision to give the prize to a very minor talent at best is a silly one, especially with both Roth and, in A Man in Full, Wolfe, at the top of their games...
...but above all, football...
...as if they were Madonnas with halos...
...Had his eyes been closed when some irresistible shift took place on the moral terrain...
...Eventually Zeus sees fit to bring Conrad and Charlie together, with results that change both their lives...
...The book, in his opinion, "amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form...
...He also acquired his prize possession, "Turpmtine," a 29,000-acre quail-shooting spread that functions as an almost exact copy—therefore a devastating parody—of an antebellum plantation, complete with tame Uncle Tom, happy darkies and a real old-fashioned overseer...
...Twenty-three years old, saddled with an infantile wife and two children, Conrad slaves away diligently under hideous conditions in hopes of one day owning a modest condo and leading a peaceful bourgeois existence...
...Perhaps the funniest scene in the book is a black-tie evening at the High Museum in honor of the gay Atlanta painter Wilson Lapeth...
...The situations are over-the-top...
...His fleet of BMWs, his private jets, his Gulfstream Five, are toast...
...Charlie is accordingly reduced to the rank of "shithead" (as the bank calls loan defaulters) and taken through a "workout session"—related with sadistic blow-by-blow glee by the evermeticulous Wolfe—at the hands of the testosterone-driven bank officers...
...Wolfe's 1990s Atlanta is hard at work cleaning up what few remnants of the Old South linger...
...A last-minute nominee for the National Book Award, A Man in Full lost out to one of those, Alice McDermott's oh-so-slight Charming Billy...
...Now Charlie is starting to understand that he is all washed up, along with his old-fashioned machismo and genial bigotry...
...Even a Baptist deacon of Charlie's acquaintance is "looking at those pictures...
...Eventually he "shucked" his nice wife and acquired a younger one, the lissome Serena, who is "Less than half his age...
...And yet the book strikes the reader as true...
...Rich white Atlanta has a very large poor black core, with its own agenda...
...One of these is the PlannersBanc workout session...
...The novel's principal subplot involves a thuggish Georgia Tech football star, Fareek "the Cannon" Fanon, accused of raping a slutty white debutante...
...The answer is a qualified yes...
...By a whim of fate he is sent from one hell, the freezer unit, to another, the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center...
...A South Georgia cracker whose father was broken down by hard work in the pulp mills, Charlie became a football star at Georgia Tech, married a girl from an old Richmond family, and went on to make zillions in real estate...
...But we should not forget that "the house of fiction," to quote James in another context, "has...
...A sudden stab of doubt...
...his nervous lawyer, Roger White II (inevitably nicknamed Roger Too White), terrified of appearing Too Black at the old Atlanta firm of Wringer Fleasom & Tick...
...We recognize these people, these houses, these scenes in a flash...
...This is the kind of decision that makes you question (again) the significance of the awards...
...Self-confidence is one thing and hubris is another, and it is hubris that has brought Charlie to the brink of disaster, in the form of a mixed-use development with a 40-story tower he named Croker Concourse...
...a decade later, he is "doing" the New South, a richly outrageous subject no serious writer, Northern or Southern, has yet tackled...
...When Faulkner wrote about the South, Updike says, he wrote about life...
...and Roger's wily friend Wesley Dobbs Jordan, the Mayor of Atlanta, up for re-election and trying to disprove black activists' characterization of him as a "beige half-brother" The book contains a number of masterful set-pieces that are vintage Wolfe, ranking with Leonard Bernstein's party for the Black Panthers sent up in "Radical Chic...
...It is one of these anonymous workers, a young man named Conrad Hensley, who becomes the novel's second hero...
...But Richman, as Serena keeps reminding the clueless Charlie, is Jewish and liberal, thoroughly horrified by the whole set-up...
...when Wolfe does so, he merely writes about the South, and in parody form at that...
...Here it is in peak form when the starting gun goes off, but after 500 or so pages it loses all will to live and eventually limps up to the finish line, woozy and out of condition...
...The characters are unabashedly cartoonish...
...The only part of his empire Charlie is not proud of—and, by this point, the only profitable one—is Croker Global Foods...
...A Man in Full is a bit like Charlie Croker himself: overblown, musclebound, crude, masculine, smart, honest...
...Himself a Virginian, Wolfe recognizes that the capital of the New South is Atlanta, never "a true Old Southern city like Savannah or Charleston or Richmond," but a place where flashiness is an asset rather than a handicap, where conspicuous consumption, not cotton, is king, and "your'honor' is the things you possess...
...One can understand why...
...The bizarre absence of Philip Roth's I Married a Communist—probably the year's best "big" book and superior by any standard to Charming Billy—would seem to indicate that the judges were hunting for newer, younger blood...
...Charlie Croker resembles Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge: a splendid anachronism, a magnificent wreck...
...Updike, whose critical acumen I have always revered, found fault with the novel for exactly the same reasons that I was finding it so satisfactory...
...Like him, too, it is sloppy and gross yet, finally, a nobler animal than its sleek, cautious young rivals...
...Atlanta high society, though, feigns—or feels?—enthusiasm for the work...
...not one window, but a million...
...The venerable Southern Planters Bank and Trust Company, for example, has become the sterilized, Euro-resonant PlannersBanc...
...The real question to ask about A Man in Full is not whether it is good the way Updike is good, or Faulkner, or James, but whether it is good the way Tom Wolfe, journalist extraordinaire, is good...
...Writers & Writing WOLFE'S NOBLE ANIMAL By Brooke Allen Halfway through Tom Wolfe's latest opus I found myself thinking how wonderful, how positively luxurious, it was to read a big, witty novel that doesn't try to be "literature...
...It is a point he doesn't know how to make clear to the "small-brained, niche-focused" people at the bank...
...In The Bonfire of the Vanities he "did" New York...
...I can't understand how I got involved in a business like that...
...He is Charlie's polar opposite, yet, in a sense, his soulmate—another man in full...
...Wolfe's prose is mean, but no one has ever accused it of being lean...
...Charlie was shocked, speechless, stupefied...
...no deep delving beneath the surface, for the surface is already interesting enough...
...Croker Concourse turns out to be a king-size flop and PlannersBanc, which had lent Charlie the money for the complex in a fit of real estate bubble fever, aims to see him bite the dust before it does...
...No other Atlanta developer had ever dared display that much ego, whether he had it or not...
...I was compelled to question my initial gut reaction, however, on reading John Updike's review of A Man in Fall (Farrar Straus Giroux, 742 pp., S28.95) in the New Yorker...
...There he discovers the writings of Epictetus the Stoic, himself a one-time prison inmate, whose words resonate to Conrad "across the millennia with an electrifying clarity...
...Was it he, Charlie, who was out of step...
...Wolfe's hero, his "man in full," is 60-year-old Charlie Croker, one of the red-hot real estate developers who re-created modern Atlanta in their own megalomaniacal image...
...Even from 50 or 60 yards away she had Second Wife written all over her...
...The rhetoric is high Wolfean baroque...
...Another is a weekend at the plantation, where Charlie intends to charm and impress fitness-center magnate Herb Richman into leasing space in Croker Concourse, an effort Charlie thinks of as bagging a pigeon: "Practically every weekend at Turpmtine had its pigeon...
Vol. 81 • December 1998 • No. 14
