A L S O+.T O D A Y

King of the World
Reviewed by Hal Hinson
The new editor of the New Yorker presents a lucid account of how "a gangly kid from Louisville" became "a molder of his age"

T A B L E+T A L K

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Nevertheless, the reader (presumably male) is expected to identify with and care about Charlie, who is in a lot of trouble. He owes a bundle to the bank, and he is getting scared -- of illness, aging, impotence and failure. Early on, he meets his match in a sadistic financial grilling called a "workout session" at PlannersBanc, where the bank's "saddlebag team" (nicknamed for the shape of the sweat they produce on the victim's shirt) makes him suffer, stammer and promise to sell his assets. Wolfe uses metaphors of Marine boot camp for the scene, in which the bank's chief "drill instructor" flaunts suspenders with a skull-and-crossbones motif. You can almost see this showdown on the big screen, but realistically speaking, it seems crude and sensationalized. Why would the bank's officers go to such extremes to humiliate and insult a big player, even one who owes them millions, in a volatile business where everyone knows that by next week the whipped dog may be eating your sorry ass?

The chapters about black Atlanta are less frenzied and much better; John Updike in the New Yorker even suggests that Wolfe is writing a "Great Black Novel." Wolfe has a great ear for accent, dialect, idiolect and dialogue, and offers an ambitiously detailed cross-section of the new black South through the eyes of the elegant Roger "Too" White -- a fastidious and cultivated lawyer defending a football star accused of rape -- and his friends, including the black mayor. There is a high-spirited chapter about Freaknik, the black college festival held in Atlanta, that recalls Wolfe's best journalism.

But Wolfe is on completely new and strange turf with his third man, young Conrad Hensley, a "straightforward struggler" who emerges as the book's spiritual center and savior. Conrad is laid off his job in the California freezer warehouse of Croker Foods when Charlie has to sell it, and through various mishaps ends up in the Alameda County Jail. His fellow workers and prisoners are lowlifes and brutes who like boom-box rap or violent country metal and admire groups like the Child Abusers singing "Eat Shit," "Pus Casserole" or "Crash 'n Burn."

Conrad, however, is made for higher things. In prison, he begins to think about his soul, starts reading the Stoic philosophers and becomes entranced by the defiance of Epictetus, who had also spent time in prison as a young man. "Only Epictetus understood why Conrad Hensley had refused to accept a plea bargain! Only Epictetus understood why he had refused to lower himself just a rung or two, demean himself just a little bit, dishonour himself just a touch." Inspired by Epictetus, aspiring to be touched by Zeus, Conrad stays cool, defends himself against the alpha-male prison rapist, Rotto, and escapes during a convenient earthquake. Eventually, working as a male nurse, he winds up taking care of Charlie and teaching him the Stoic way: "If you say to a Stoic, 'Look, you do what I tell you or I'll kill you,' he'll look you in the eye and say, 'You do what you have to do, and I'll do what I have to do -- and when did I ever tell you I was immortal?'"

This credo gets to Charlie Croker and helps him make a surprising conversion: "Charlie felt serene. He no longer felt pain in his knee ... He felt tranquil and ... light. His feet only just barely touched the marble and the earth below. He felt as if he could run a hundred yards just the way he had forty years ago. Wouldn't that amaze them all! He had shed all the shabby baggage of this life. He had become a vessel of the Divine." In the name of this newfound divinity, he renounces his worldly goods.

This conclusion seems to have touched the hearts of many of Wolfe's reviewers, who praise the novel's warmth, humanity and depth. But in fact, Stoicism seems to pay off for all its disciples, who are handsomely rewarded for their so-called renunciations. Charlie gives up real estate and becomes a full-time celebrity evangelist for Stoicism, with a TV syndication deal. Conrad is paroled instead of sent back to jail when he nobly turns himself in. In Wolfe's version of Stoicism, pity is a wasted emotion, since everyone is responsible for his own bad luck. Moreover, the ethical enlightenment of Stoicism doesn't require any awkward self-sacrifice or emotional compromises and efforts. Charlie doesn't go back to his first wife, or try to make a real marriage with his second, or even try to be a decent father to his children. Like the classic American hero, he hits the road alone and unencumbered. The young hero of Anne Tyler's novel "Saint Maybe," by contrast, causes his brother's death, and is advised by the pastor of her imaginary "Church of the Second Chance" to drop out of college and take responsibility for raising his brother's children. Charlie's serenity comes from the rejuvenating qualities of shedding the "shabby baggage" of marriage and paternity.

Stoicism is actually a stark philosophy, which insists that everyone has the choice of committing suicide when life is overwhelming, and thus can never be enslaved. But Wolfe's heroes use Stoicism to liberate themselves from convention, responsibility and restraint in the name of "honor" and "manhood." Charlie's conversion barely calls into question the rampant and ruthless capitalism that has run his life. In Wolfe's hands, Stoicism is truly the religion of the entrepreneur, a self-help program for those who swim with the sharks.

Maybe a million aspiring Charlie Crokers will buy this book, but somehow I doubt it. They'll wait for the movie. And next time, Wolfe warns us, he wants to write a novel about universities. "The topic sounds dull," he told Paul Gray, "but I think there are plenty of madcap episodes going on in that field that might be fun to write about." I can already imagine the scene where the sadistic department chair tells the cocky young prof that he won't get tenure: the workout. But the stakes will be a lot smaller, and that might not be a bad thing.
SALON | Nov. 12, 1998

Elaine Showalter is a professor of English at Princeton University and the author of "Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media."

Discuss "A Man in Full" and this review in the Books area of Table Talk.