I met Tom Wolfe over 20 years ago.
It was at a book signing for I Am Charlotte Simmons, which frankly isn’t that great. Nonetheless, I was thrilled to see one of my favorite authors speak and then interact with him ever so briefly during the book signing session.
I asked him about Neal Cassady, one of the more fascinating pop cultural figures of the mid-20th Century. This dude was part of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’s beatnik crew going back to the late ‘40s – and famously shows up in the form of Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road, one of the great characters in literary history – and then somehow circa the mid-60s reappears in the form of the pilled up driver of the psychedelic bus called Further in Tom Wolfe’s classic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Full disclosure: I don’t recall exactly what Wolfe said in response to my likely fumbling question. What I do recall is that Tom Wolfe looked precisely how you’d want him to: impeccably dressed and put together in a three-piece white suit with some kind of fancy fedora hat to go along with it.
Anyway, I’d place A Man in Full, published in 1998, as a very good if not great novel. It’s long and immersive though, and is the kind of book where I do think about it and its ideas occasionally.
In short: the novel is about an Atlanta real estate tycoon’s fall from grace, but also ties in lots of stuff about race and class and politics and even philosophy (there’s a lot about stoicism going on) in the modern South.
Any adaptation would have lots of material to work with, while also facing a huge challenge in translating Wolfe’s specific satiric style onto the screen (see: the disaster of The Bonfire of the Vanities movie from 1990).
I missed the limited series version of A Man in Full when it premiered on Netflix in 2024, so I was intrigued to check it out when I stumbled across it recently.
A Man in Full the TV show was created by David E. Kelley, with Regina King and Thomas Schlamme directing. If you’d never heard of Tom Wolfe or his novel, one of the first things you’d notice is that its cast is eye-poppingly stunning.
Jeff Daniels stars as Charlie Croker, the real estate tycoon and central figure, and he leans into playing a Southern Master of the Universe at the precipice of disgrace and failure. Tom Pelphrey – now super high on my radar due to his stunning performance in HBO’s Task – plays one of Croker’s foils with the fantastic character name of Raymond Peepgass, a banker, while the great Diane Lane plays Croker’s ex-wife.
Actor after actor on this show could and even should be starring in their own series. William Jackson Harper, Chidi of The Good Place and Midsommar fame, plays Atlanta’s mayor (and he’s fantastic in a relatively small role). Superstar character actor Bill Camp is also in the mix, and Lucy Liu is in a tiny role the producers didn’t seem to know what to do with.
There’s a significant subplot that involves a Black man getting arrested and falling down the rabbit hole of an unjust and inhumane justice system. Jon Michael Hill – who was on Elementary for 153 episodes and who was recently in the outstanding Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, starring Tatiana Maslany – plays Conrad Hensley, who in the show punches a police officer after getting physically assaulted during an arrest.
I mention “in the show” specifically because the novel treats Conrad Hensley’s story quite differently, and it’s where the subject of stoicism becomes an important layer of the entire tapestry of the book. The TV show mentions stoicism in passing, almost as a weird afterthought, and then does a ham-handed job of tying the Hensley and Croker stories together overall.
Which is a short way of saying that while the cast is stellar and A Man in Full has the perfect sheen of prestige television that is common these days, both the story structure and the tone of the show don’t fully work.
This ties in part, I think, to the number of episodes (six) and their length (each is in let’s say the 47-minute range). A Man in Full felt both too long and too short at the same time. It’s a weird tweener, in other words. It might have worked better as a briskly paced two hour movie or a more expansive 9 or 10 episodes that would have allowed the Croker and Hensley storylines to resolve more organically.
Speaking of Croker and Hensley: the book places the two in close proximity during its final stretch, where Croker has something of a redemption arc involving his discovery of stoicism. As I mentioned, the TV show is wildly different in this regard, and doesn’t have a single scene that puts the two characters together.
Instead, the Jeff Daniels character is made to look sympathetic by his consistent attempts to help Hensley from afar (the plot is a little complex here, so I’ll leave it at that). While I take it that we’re supposed to see Croker as a three-dimensional and human figure, instead it comes off as messy and frankly pretty strange.
That being said, I stuck around through the end of A Man in Full and was pretty interested to see what would happen next at every turn – mostly because almost the entire cast has that “they’re great in everything” quality.
However, my prevailing opinion about A Man in Full is that it is perfectly mediocre prestige television.