Less Than Half ‘A Man in Full’
One of US television’s most experienced and talented writers has made a mess of Tom Wolfe’s second novel.
NOTE: The following essay discusses A Man in Full—the new Netflix series and the Tom Wolfe novel on which it is based. There are spoilers throughout.
I.
The new six-part Netflix miniseries A Man In Full is a binge-worthy piece of entertainment that bears little relation to the 1998 Tom Wolfe novel of the same name on which it is based. The show is written and created by David E. Kelley, who is a master of the genre, having previously written and produced TV adaptations of Liane Moriarty’s novels Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s You Should Have Known (the source of HBO’s The Undoing), Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer, Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes, and many others.
Unfortunately, Kelley is not up to the task of adapting Tom Wolfe. Wolfe wasn’t just an entertainer, he was also a sharp social satirist. His novels were not just meant to amuse, they also provided trenchant critiques of American life. And the material in Wolfe’s book that Kelley has either reworked or stripped out entirely is exactly the stuff that would have made it both controversial and highly relevant to our current political and cultural moment.
Wolfe’s novel is about Charlie Croker, a 60-year-old Atlanta business tycoon whose financial empire is in peril. Croker owns a network of frozen-food warehouses across the US, but his pride and joy is Croker Concourse, a 40-story skyscraper-cum-commercial complex located near the outskirts of Atlanta. Croker is the star around which all of the other characters in the novel orbit. The most distant of these satellites is Conrad Hensley, a white 23-year-old married father-of-two who lives 2,800 miles from Atlanta in Oakland, California, and works in one of Croker’s warehouses. His dream is to purchase a condo unit in nearby Contra Costa County and raise his family in middle-class comfort. For most of the novel’s immense length, Croker and Hensley are unaware of each other’s existence but Wolfe draws the two narrative threads together for the finale.
Other satellites include Serena, Croker’s much younger second wife and a shopaholic; Croker’s first wife, Martha; Raymond Peepgass, a loan officer who has always toadied up to Croker but has turned against him as Croker’s finances sour; Harry Zale, a “workout specialist” at PlannersBanc, who tries to crush Croker’s ego when the loans go bad; Wes Jordan, the young black mayor of Atlanta; and Roger White III (nicknamed Roger Too White), a young black Atlanta attorney who acts as an intermediary between Croker and the mayor. Croker may be a star, but he’s a dying star, and his collapse threatens to pull everyone around him into the black hole of his financial ruin. Most of these characters are scrambling to distance themselves from Croker in one way or another—only Hensley tries to help when he finally sees the trouble Croker is in. This development is ironic because Hensley’s life falls apart as a result of Croker’s callousness.
As Croker’s financial problems become critical, his accountant advises him to sell off a 29,000-acre plantation that Croker primarily uses for hunting quail. The plantation is listed as a business asset because Croker occasionally entertains clients there, but it generates no income and costs a fortune to maintain. Rather than part with his beloved plantation, Croker opts to sack 15 percent of the staff working in his frozen-food warehouses instead. As a result, Conrad Hensley and hundreds of other employees across the nation are thrown out of their jobs so that Croker can hang on to his quail-hunting plantation.
While Hensley is out job-hunting, his car is unfairly impounded. Unable to afford the impound fee, he breaks into the lot to steal his vehicle back and gets arrested. He is sent to Santa Rita jail, a violent county lock-up about 30 miles south of Oakland, largely controlled by racial gangs. There, Hensley finds comfort in an anthology of writings by famous Stoics, particularly Epictetus, Agrippinus, and Zeno. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Stoic philosophy to Wolfe’s novel—he seems to have written it to illustrate how Stoicism might be applied in everyday American life. Hensley’s life is transformed by his introduction to the Stoics, and much later in the book, Croker’s life will be similarly altered after Hensley introduces him to the same thinkers.
Stoicism teaches Hensley to speak the truth as he sees it no matter what the dangers may be. After he embraces this approach, he loses much of his fear of jail. His tormentors detect a change in him—a willingness to fight rather than meekly acquiesce to their demands—and they begin to leave him alone. In a plot twist straight out of an ancient Greek tragedy, Hensley is sprung from jail when an earthquake destroys the facility’s perimeter wall and he slips off into the night. Eventually, through a complicated—and not very believable—series of events, he ends up living in Atlanta under an assumed identity where he lands a job assisting invalids in their homes. When Charlie Croker is discharged from hospital after he has an artificial knee implanted, Hensley becomes his home-care assistant. These plot contrivances work because Wolfe’s satire is modelled after the works of Dickens and Thackeray; it isn’t intended as a work of realism.
By the time he meets Conrad Hensley, Charlie Croker is experiencing a crisis of conscience. One of the novel’s threads involves a Georgia Tech running back named Fareek “the Cannon” Fanon, a black man rumoured to have raped a white college girl named Elizabeth Armholster in his dorm room. Elizabeth has told her parents about the rape but refuses to report it to the police. Her father, Inman Armholster, is another wealthy Atlanta businessman and an old friend of Charlie Croker’s. The black mayor of Atlanta, Wes Jordan, suspects that a race riot might erupt if Fanon, a local sporting hero in the black community, is arrested for raping a rich white girl, and Jordan believes that Croker is uniquely positioned to help him forestall that crisis. Croker was a Georgia Tech football hero back in the 1950s and is now highly regarded in the white community. Mayor Jordan has promised to intercede in Croker’s problems with PlannersBanc if Croker will agree to hold a press conference at which he declares that Fanon is innocent of rape.
Croker is a bigot and believes that Fanon is probably guilty. What’s more, by publicly defending Fanon against the rape charge to get relief from the bank, Croker will also destroy his friendship with Inman Armholster. Croker has just enough integrity left to feel guilty about accepting the mayor’s offer, but after Conrad Hensley introduces him to Stoicism, he has a change of heart. At the scheduled press conference, with the mayor standing behind him, he announces that he has been threatened with financial ruin if he doesn’t defend Fanon. But he has decided that he is less bothered by the idea of financial bankruptcy than he is by the idea of moral bankruptcy. He then tells his creditors to come and take his assets, including his beloved Croker Concourse, and vows not to contest the seizures. He leaves with his wife and young child and becomes a sort of Jordan Peterson-like evangelist of Stoicism with his own show on the Fox network.
