(2 of 7)
What remained constant in Wolfe's mind throughout this creative marathon was a tour two Atlanta friends had given him back in 1989 of the plantations of southwest Georgia, immense tracts of property, dotted with sumptuous homes and extensive outbuildings, maintained at staggering expense by the superrich for the principal reason of shooting quail in season between Thanksgiving and the end of February. "I look for milieu first," Wolfe says, "the setting of a story before the story itself, and I was astonished at those plantations, their psychological location in the past and the tremendous amount of conspicuous consumption required to maintain them. I thought they would make great material."
A fictional Georgia plantation is, at long last, where A Man in Full begins. The trip readers make from there to the end of the book will store up fuel for literary discussions and debates throughout, and probably beyond, the coming winter. The 1.2 million copies of its first printing, an astounding number for a novel not written by somebody named Clancy or Grisham, are heading toward the stores. And the book has already received a publicity boost that exceeds the power of purse strings: four weeks before the Nov. 12 publication date, A Man in Full was nominated for a 1998 National Book Award.
Those expecting another Bonfire may be disappointed--the new novel is better. It's not quite as glitzy and brash and hilariously in-your-face as its predecessor, but then Atlanta in the late '90s, where most of the action occurs, is a more well-mannered place than New York City was in the '80s. The same bloodlusts--sex, money, status--rage in the New South as they do everywhere else; it just takes a little more digging to find them. Wolfe does, of course, but among all the animal appetites that are slaked or comically thwarted during the novel there appears one new to Wolfe's fiction. For all their affluence, or their pained lack of same, his chief characters hunger for a code of conduct or a framework of beliefs that will make sense of their lives right now, a blink before the millennium. At its heart, A Man in Full is a cliff-hanging morality tale.
The adventure takes off from Turpmtine--the local Georgia pronunciation of the product once derived from the pinetree resin harvested there. The 29,000 acres of this plantation belong to Charlie Croker, 60, a high-stakes Atlanta real estate developer with a second wife 32 years his junior and an arthritic knee, a relic from his days of playing football for Georgia Tech. Among his many earthly possessions, Turpmtine is by far Charlie's most cherished; he sees it as a validation not of his wealth but of something deeper: "You had to be man enough to deserve a quail plantation." In fact, some of Charlie's older servants at Turpmtine remember a song about a local, long-ago legend also named Charlie Croker, and the master loves to hear them sing it. The ditty begins, "Charlie Croker was a man in full/ He had a back like a Jersey Bull."
Unfortunately, our Charlie Croker is also a man in trouble. His latest development, a grandiose tower named Croker Concourse, is undertenanted and hemorrhaging money. He owes PlannersBanc in Atlanta $515 million and an assortment of other lenders $285 million more, and he can't even meet interest on all that debt, never mind repay the principal.