Jeff Daniels as Charlie Crocker in The Full Man Credit: TV Stills
The Full Man, a new big-budget Netflix's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's best-selling 1998 novel was shaping up to be one of the year's most prestigious dramas. Its creator, David E. Kelley, is one of the titans of American television, responsible for everything from Ally McBeal to the recent Big Little Lies, and its protagonist is the titan Jeff Daniels, who has successfully transformed himself from amiable comic actor to authority figure. who excels at high drama, often tragic in its scope.
On paper, that weight might fit Daniels' role as the novel's protagonist Charlie Crocker, a Lear-like real estate magnate who finds himself facing disgrace and bankruptcy when events in his life take an unexpected and disastrous turn. directions.
Unfortunately, although Daniels, an actor clearly incapable of acting impartially, is as great as ever, the show is a flop. Although Kelly's shows usually receive critical acclaim, this time around he was showered with some of the worst reviews of his career, with Anita Singh comparing it unfavorably to Succession in this article: “It's not a disaster, but you're not going to fall in love with This”. Still, it's a hit, ranking just behind the inevitable “Fawn” on Netflix's most-watched list.
However, even those who enjoyed the series were left stunned by the final episode, “Judgment Day,” in which Kelly deviates significantly from the original novel. (Spoilers follow.) Wolfe's book ended with Crocker renouncing his fortune, embracing the philosophical doctrine of Stoicism, and moving to Florida to start a new life as a television evangelist. However, in the series, Crocker finds himself in a mortal struggle with his nemesis (and his ex-wife's lover) Raymond Pipgrass, who mocks his rival's masculinity while naked.
After a lengthy fight scene in which Crocker strangles Pipgrass, he suffers a heart attack and dies himself. The scene, which has the same stunning quality as the finale of the first series of Big Little Lies, was widely dismissed as laughable, ridiculous and bizarre. from afar.
Of course, when his book was first published, it was one of the most anticipated novels of the nineties. Wolfe was one of the most influential literary figures in America, and the book took the better part of a decade to research and write. The talk in every salon was who exactly would be satirized in this new book and how Wolfe had managed to uncover some of Atlanta's most scandalous secrets.
Just as Truman Capote, three decades ago, caused untold confusion when he published his novel La Côte Basque in Esquire, revealing the secrets of some of New York's best-connected high society women, so Wolfe took aim at the upper crust of Atlanta . and definitely pierced her pretensions and morals. This is especially true when it comes to ideas of racial tension: one of the novel's most provocative plots involves a KKK rally sparked by rumors that a black athlete had raped a white sorority woman. As journalist Amy Bonesteel wrote in Atlanta magazine: “Long before its 1998 publication, Tom Wolfe's Atlanta-set novel The Full Man was the talk of Buckhead cocktail parties; Once the 742-page opus hit the shelves, the chatter became deafening.”
Just as Capote was ostracized by the people he ridiculed, so Wolfe received a comeuppance of sorts. He was not invited to a high-profile dinner hosted by former Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell in the city's fashionable Buckhead neighborhood. Mayor Bill Campbell at the time of the book's publication, himself an African American, also issued a statement angrily condemning the book and praising Atlanta's proud history of racial harmony. Unfortunately, Campbell was found guilty of tax evasion and jailed amid rumors that he was struggling with substance abuse.
Tom Wolfe in 1998 Photo: AP
However, unlike Charlie Crocker, Wolfe himself was too big to fail. Perhaps thanks to the fact that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution began a regular, semi-satirical column called Wolfe Watch, which detailed his comings and goings, the book attracted almost frenzied attention upon publication: one autograph line at the Borders bookstore in Buckhead stretched almost for an eternity. nine o'clock. Much of the local attention has focused on Crocker's inspiration. Atlanta magazine published a helpful flowchart suggesting he owes something to everyone from developers Tom Cousins and John Portman to the splendidly named civic leader Charles Loudermilk, who, like Crocker, left his wife for a much younger woman and lived in baronial luxury. lived on a huge estate and was even a member of the prestigious Piedmont drivers' club. This is not a carpool service, as the name suggests, but a private Atlanta social club where its members (rather shyly, as you might imagine) drive carriages around its spacious grounds.
Although The Full Man initially received critical acclaim and sold approximately 750,000 hardcover novels, a backlash soon began, led by such longtime Woolf detractors as John Irving, Norman Mailer, and John Updike. The “Three Stooges,” as Wolfe called them, tore the book apart. Irving said of the novel: “It’s like reading a bad newspaper or a bad magazine article. It makes you wince.” Meanwhile, Updike wrote in the New Yorker that “The Full Man is still entertainment, not literature, not even literature in modestly ambitious form.”
Typically, it was Mailer – the elder statesman of the group at age 75 – who gave the most scathing description of it, comparing reading a lengthy novel to having sex with a 300-pound woman and saying: “Once she's on top, it's all over.” Fall in love or suffocate.”
Jeff Daniels and Sarah Jones in the movie “The Full Man” Photo: Netflix
Wolfe responded to the criticism with typical equanimity, saying of his detractors: “It’s hysterical. This is wonderful hysteria. The Full Man panicked [Irving] the same way he scared John Updike and Norman. Scared them. Made them panic.” Yet Wolfe, by then approaching sixty, had watched his own career unfold over the previous decades. He went from being a pioneer of the new journalism, writing from a subjective, argot-laden point of view on everything from Phil Spector's disgrace (The First Teen Tycoon) to NASCAR driver Junior Johnson (The Last American Hero) to a towering figure at the heart of America's literary elite, rarely seen without the immaculate white suit that is his signature. Mailer ridiculed him for this in 1989: “In my opinion, there is something stupid about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York.” Wolfe replied: “The top dog is the one they're always trying to bite in the ass.”
The first collection of his articles, 1965's The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, may have been something of a bombshell, but it was a significantly abridged version of the story that inspired them, a 1963 Esquire magazine article entitled ” Coming (Varoom)! Varum!) This Kandy-colored (Tfhhhhhh!) Tangerine streamlined child (Raaaaah!) is around the corner (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm)… His success led to Woolf becoming one of the most famous writers of his generation.
Big Dog: Tom Wolfe in 2016 Photo: Dan Callister
In his book Radical Chic & Regarding the Mau Mau “Bullshit Catchers” – for which he was pilloried by a particularly angry Panther as “that dirty, outrageous, lying, racist dog who wrote this fascist disgusting thing” – to a more traditional description of America's pioneering work in the space program, ” The Right Stuff,” which director Philip Kaufman made into a thrilling film in 1982.
Yet Wolfe set his sights on the transition from “new journalism” to “new fiction.” He admitted that he was tired of the comparatively low expectations of authors such as Updike and Mailer, and decided instead that he would write a novel that would be nothing less than an American interpretation of the great satirical works of Thackeray or Dickens. He had previously stated that “in abandoning socialist realism, novelists also abandoned certain vitally important technical issues. As a result, by 1969 this became obvious. . . magazine writers are the same lumpen proles themselves! – also gained a technical advantage over novelists. It was wonderful”. Now he had to put his money where his mouth was, figuratively speaking.
The result was a book that will surely be remembered as his masterpiece: 1987's The Bonfire of the Vanities. A brutal satire of everything from Wall Street's so-called Masters of the Universe to race relations in modern New York, it, along with Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, became the defining American novel of the eighties. Like Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Dickens's Bleak House, it began life as a serial in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine before being refined and edited into book form, where it sold millions of copies and made Wolfe the toast of Manhattan cocktail society. , even if—as with The Whole Man a decade later—some of those he satirized were less inclined to join in the approval.
Bruce Willis in the Doomed Bonfire of the Vanities, 1990. Photo: Archive Photos
Karma duly arrived a few years later when the book was adapted into a film adaptation by the surprise choice of Brian De Palma, starring the even more unlikely duo of Tom Hanks as the novel's cold and cynical protagonist Sherman McCoy and Bruce Willis as an alcoholic English journalist. Peter Fallow (supposedly inspired by Christopher Hitchens). It softened the book's satirical thrust, right down to Morgan Freeman's potentially inspiring climate sermon as the judge declaring that “decency is something your grandmother taught you,” and proved that Woolf's kinetic, vivid prose style was impossible to translate into English. screen, as “Man in Full” has now so successfully demonstrated.
Woolf continued to write both novels and journalism until his death in 2018, although in truth nothing has ever matched The Bonfire of the Vanities for cultural impact. His most recent two novels are 2004's I Am Charlotte Simmons—Wolff's take on sexual mores at a fictional Ivy League university, which received the unlikely honor of being awarded the Bad Sex Prize for Literature—and 2012's Back to the Blood, a retelling of more early themes, this time targeting Cuban immigrants, were both significant financial disappointments. It was estimated that the $7 million advance for Back to Blood was so far from being earned that the book's comparatively meager readership (62,000 copies sold) meant that each title cost the publishers over $100 to produce.
Nevertheless, he remains one of the most significant American literary figures of the postwar era. Without it, we wouldn't have such seemingly banal phrases as “good old boy”, “radical chic” and, of course, “the right thing”; We wouldn’t have the imperfect but intriguing Man in full and the Bonfire of Vanity. He's never publicly commented on the horrific adaptation – other than to say he wanted Chevy Chase to play McCoy – and it's doubtful he'd have anything to say about Whole Man either. But privately he would almost certainly have enjoyed the controversy the changes had created. Perhaps this “New Journalist” and “New Novelist” would also be amused by the appearance of “New Television”.
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