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A MAN IN FULL | BY TOM WOLFE | FARRAR STRAUS AND GIROUX | 742 PAGES

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By Elaine Showalter

Nov. 29, 1999 | Look out, America! Here comes Tom Wolfe's new novel -- a million copies in print! A full 742 pages! Eleven years in the writing! Nominated for the National Book Award before publication! It's a blockbuster, a doorstopper, a lollapalooza set in the Atlanta of the Old South and the new black South, the Olympics and Freaknik. And it could have been even bigger. Only recently did Wolfe decide he didn't have "to write the biggest book in the world," as he told Time's Paul Gray. He discarded "bales" of manuscripts -- unused pages on Japan, TV news, insurance sales.

Some fans of Wolfe's previous bestsellers may be sorry, but I, for one, am grateful. "A Man in Full" is already a supersize swig of literary testosterone, Wolfe's exhaustive and exhausting manifesto of masculinity at the millennium. It has subplots about real estate wheeler-dealers, stressed-out bankers, blue-blooded African-American politicians with fabulous suits and priceless collections of Yoruba art, illegal Asian immigrants, superfluous discarded wives and blue-collar workers, but the question at the heart of the novel is what makes a man a real man, a man's man, a man in full. Like his hero Charlie Croker, Wolfe lets us know he has "masculinity to burn." He sorts out the "true Male Animals" from the passive wimps. His preferred men look like bulls or lions, with rippling muscles, thick necks and huge forearms. Black or white, rich or poor, they are combat-ready, eager to turn every business transaction, social occasion and sporting event into a struggle for male conquest. Readers should not be slow to get the repellent point.

But Wolfe has more than machismo up his sleeve. Since the '80s, he has been anticipating a Third Great Awakening, an American religious movement born out of luxury, narcissism and greed. In 1995, Wolfe was predicting a spiritual revival for the millennium. The '90s, he argued, were the decade of moral fever rather than money fever. In August 1996, Wolfe had a quintuple heart bypass operation, followed by a prolonged depression from which he was rescued by Dr. Paul McHugh, psychiatrist in chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and the main dedicatee of "A Man in Full." His survey of decadent end-of-the-century American masculinity is also a quest for religious transcendence, pursued through a trio of larger-than-life protagonists.

Charlie Croker is a fabulously rich, 60-year-old real estate developer with a gorgeous 28-year-old trophy wife. He likes to feel "earthy, Down Home, elemental, which is to say, he was no longer merely a real estate developer, he was ... a man." He wrestles rattlesnakes with his bare hands. He takes his weekend guests to the breeding barn to watch a stallion, penis like a "long, dark evil leather knout," mount a mare in heat. Charlie follows up this Jamesian scene of delicate indirection with a little homophobic homily: "People can talk about gay rats till they're blue in the face ... But there's the heart of it ... That's what it all boils down to at the end, the male and the female, and that's it."

Charlie also struts his stuff in the opening chapter, a quail hunt at Turpmtine, his costly 29,000-acre Georgia plantation, kept going by black "retainers" for the fall shooting season. But the scene -- which resembles a set piece in the traditional English novel where aristocrats still do go off to the country to kill birds -- rings false and eccentric in the American setting. (Walter Kirn, reviewing the novel in New York magazine, complains that "no veteran bird hunter ... would go after quail with buckshot." Talk about one-upmanship.)

Being a full man in macho white Atlanta includes making fun of the AIDS Ball ("Let's Riff for Syph!"). Wolfe juxtaposes satiric scenes of a Mapplethorpish museum opening featuring huge murals of homoerotic prison scenes with a brutal prison rape. Charlie slips up and calls a Jewish client, Herb Richman, "Hebe." He regards women older than 30 as cows with "sagging hides," and his ex-wife Martha "has shoulders like a middle linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys ... and how often could you get aroused by a forty-some-year-old woman with that much beef in her neck and shoulders and her upper back?" Such thoughts, Charlie tells himself, are "the way the male animal was constituted." Male animals are also constituted to ignore their children, especially if they are female or effeminate, like his sensitive son Wally. At the end of the novel, Charlie's baby daughter Kingsley, by his second wife, actually seems to have vanished, and good riddance to a "pale little creature."

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