at the South’s preeminent neo-Confederate college, Washington and Lee,
then at Yale. Now long a stylish Manhattan boulevardier, he is a writer of
breadth and witty passion. Best known perhaps for his portrait of the Mer-
cury astronauts,The Right Stuff(), Wolfe had pilloried the hip white
counterculture and the New Left during the s and early s. He took
up fiction—most notoriouslyThe Bonfire of the Vanities()—but also
made himself an authority on architecture and decor, as demonstrated in
hisThe Painted Word() andFrom Bauhaus to Our House().
These last expertises crowd endless pages inA Man in Full, which is fic-
tion about possessions as much as anything. The title character is Charles
(always ‘‘Charlie’’) Croker, who is sixty years old during the late s year
the novel takes place. Croker is a cracker, or a plain old redneck, from way
down in Georgia’s southwest, the endless piney woods of Baker County. He
is a big man with sturdy legs, huge arms, a shockingly expansive chest, a
tree trunk of a neck, and a back that suggests to everyone that of another
species. Charlie relishes comparison with a folkloric character described
by country folks down in Baker, a character also named Charlie Croker:
‘‘Charlie Croker was a man in full / He had a back like a Jersey bull.’’ The
physique (and high school heroics) won him a football scholarship to Geor-
gia Tech, where he became the legendary ‘‘ Minute Man’’ during the late
s and early s. Charlie played linebacker on defense, running back
on offense. After graduation and a tour in Vietnam, he returned to Atlanta
and became a real estate salesman. Tireless, crude, aggressive, reckless,
and gregarious, Charlie did well and became a developer himself, and fabu-
lously wealthy. ‘‘People don’t think of Charlie as clever and shrewd,’’ his ex-
wife reflects, ‘‘they think of him more as a force of nature.’’^19
At sixty Charlie has grown a paunch and suffers recurrent pain in his
right knee—football casualty, naturally. But there are compensations: He
has dumped his longtime wife and separated himself from their three
children in favor of a new wife, a bit less than half his age, and their
baby girl, whom he also ignores. Charlie runs his business, Croker Global,
from a marble, glass, and dark wood office in a tower high above down-
town Atlanta. Croker Global includes his vast real estate holdings, a devel-
opment company, and Croker Global Foods, a coast-to-coast (not global,
really) collection of warehouses from which he distributes food, mostly
frozen. Charlie also has what the Internal Revenue Service accepts as an
‘‘experimental farm’’ down in Baker. It is called Turpmtine [sic], suggest-
ing the landscape’s industrial beginnings as turpentine plantation. Actu-
ally Turpmtine is a ,-acre private quail-hunting retreat for Charlie,