787 pages, oof
Oct. 3rd, 2004 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacJust finished reading Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, in a paperback copy I picked up cheap in Ashland. If I can get a book this thick in a single solidly-made mass-market paperback, I will. Much easier to carry around. (Do you suppose Jonathan Strange will ever come out in such an edition?)
Took me less than a day to read it all. Admittedly I had read parts of it before in a library copy and I always find re-reading faster, but that was years ago and I read it almost as fast then. Considering how much trouble I have getting into almost anything in the SF/fantasy field published today, and how quickly I read the few non-sfnal novels that come my way, that's astonishing. Wolfe's prose is extremely fluid: that has a lot to do with it.
Much similarity to Bonfire of the Vanities, which I also liked. Both are fat books with interweaving stories of various people, centering around a hubristic character's fall. Bonfire is about the decline and fall of a high-rolling New York investment broker; Man is about the fall (it skips the decline) of a high-rolling Atlanta real-estate tycoon. Most of the characters are greedy and self-absorbed, and most of these suffer in ways comically exaggerated beyond their just desserts. The protagonist earns his final salvation through an initially unrelated subplot that begins with his deciding to lay off some workers, and continues through a California earthquake that levels a prison (eyebrows raised at this) and ends when he ... no, I'd better stop there.
If you just want to sample the book, read chapter 11 (ironically, one of the few chapters that does not discuss bankruptcy, though it has a lot to say about lack of money). It's 28 pages of the mounting frustration of a man who finds his car ticketed and towed through no fault of his, and his inability to retrieve it due to an uncaring system. It's a masterpiece of man against the modern world that in scale outdoes even the pioneer of this particular genre, the scene of the agonizingly slow city bus ride in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. This kind of thing is an only minimally-exaggerated retelling of what a life of daily errands is like all the time, and it's astonishing how few good depctions of it there are in fiction.
Took me less than a day to read it all. Admittedly I had read parts of it before in a library copy and I always find re-reading faster, but that was years ago and I read it almost as fast then. Considering how much trouble I have getting into almost anything in the SF/fantasy field published today, and how quickly I read the few non-sfnal novels that come my way, that's astonishing. Wolfe's prose is extremely fluid: that has a lot to do with it.
Much similarity to Bonfire of the Vanities, which I also liked. Both are fat books with interweaving stories of various people, centering around a hubristic character's fall. Bonfire is about the decline and fall of a high-rolling New York investment broker; Man is about the fall (it skips the decline) of a high-rolling Atlanta real-estate tycoon. Most of the characters are greedy and self-absorbed, and most of these suffer in ways comically exaggerated beyond their just desserts. The protagonist earns his final salvation through an initially unrelated subplot that begins with his deciding to lay off some workers, and continues through a California earthquake that levels a prison (eyebrows raised at this) and ends when he ... no, I'd better stop there.
If you just want to sample the book, read chapter 11 (ironically, one of the few chapters that does not discuss bankruptcy, though it has a lot to say about lack of money). It's 28 pages of the mounting frustration of a man who finds his car ticketed and towed through no fault of his, and his inability to retrieve it due to an uncaring system. It's a masterpiece of man against the modern world that in scale outdoes even the pioneer of this particular genre, the scene of the agonizingly slow city bus ride in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. This kind of thing is an only minimally-exaggerated retelling of what a life of daily errands is like all the time, and it's astonishing how few good depctions of it there are in fiction.
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Date: 2004-10-03 04:53 pm (UTC)