NAILING THE '90s A MAN IN FULL By Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus & Giroux 742pp $28.95 What a difference 11 years make. When Tom Wolfe turned a satiric eye on the world of business and high finance in his 1987 novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, his embodiment of the zeitgeist was Sherman McCoy, a bond-trading ''Master of the Universe'' at the height of his powers. A Man in Full, Wolfe's new end-of-the-millennium novel, is a metaphorical counterweight to Bonfire. (At a prodigious 742 pages, to Bonfire's 659, it comes close to being a literal counterweight, too.) In this satire of late 20th-century America, the springs have come unwound. This time, the hero is an aging, near-bankrupt real estate mogul with a bum knee, named Charlie Croker. By page 50, Charlie stands to lose his entire empire, including a namesake skyscraper, a lavish quail plantation, and a 28-year-old trophy wife. Everything about this book is brawny, from its physical heft to its winding plots and subplots to the characters, many of whom are described by their musculature. (What are the trapezii, anyway?) There's Charlie, with a back like a Jersey bull. While he's busy being stripped of his pride and his assets in Atlanta, poor but idealistic former Croker employee Conrad Hensley, with his massive forearms, is enduring a vividly described stay in a California jail. Meanwhile, back in Atlanta, Roger White II, a black lawyer at a white-shoe firm, is negotiating that city's twin perils of race and politics. The event that somewhat laboriously pulls these separate stories onto one track is the possible rape of a rich white coed by an up-from-the-streets black football star. The storylines unfold in a series of meticulously detailed set pieces, which include a graphic description of the procedure by which high-priced show horses mate and a tour of working conditions inside a food company's warehouse-size freezer. The most spectacular scene--it alone validates the book's $28.95 cover price--is Charlie's encounter with his bank's workout crew. Gone are the high-priced lunches and adoring loan officers. Now in default on a half-billion dollars of debt, Charlie is summoned to a dreary, formica-surfaced conference room. Suffice it to say, he enters a tycoon and leaves a broken wretch. On their own, this scene and others are tiny comic masterpieces. But pile them one on top of the other, and they add up to something less than masterful, especially given the novel's truncated ending. Possibly because of the intricate plotting, the characters seem secondary to the story. And despite the narrative sweep--which ranges from Oakland, Calif., to Atlanta and encompasses young and old, rich and poor, black and white--half of humanity is strangely missing, specifically, the female half. Here, women come in only three varieties: shrewish current wife, gold-digging second wife, and pathetic, cast-off first wife. In a work that strives to skewer the full panoply of '90s commerce and politics, it feels odd to roam the hallways of banks, law firms, and city hall without meeting one female professional. Surely women can be as vain, craven, and worthy of Wolfe's sting as men? Despite its comic heights and ample girth, in the end, A Man in Full is less than fully satisfying. BY MARY KUNTZ RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``A Man in Full''

Updated Nov. 12, 1998 by bwwebmaster
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