Dreamland

Some books you read because you thought you might like them, or you liked something else by the same author, or you got the book for a gift.

Or even all of the above.

I remember enjoying Tom Wolfe's writing in the past, so I wasn't surprised when I found it enjoyable again in A Man in Full, his novel of success and failure in Atlanta real estate.

But the title was wrong. It should have been A Man in Caricature. The plot hijinks were outlandish, but the characters were not real. Puzzled, dumfounded, left at a loss, they had the depth and dimensionality of straw figures.

Even Conrad's jailhouse conversion to a Zeus-based stoic philosophy/religion, gripping as it was, was still pretty much black and white.

If you want to read a book in which people's lives evolve mainly through accidents of own their ineptness (when they're not controlled by happenstance), then A Man in Full is for you.

reviewed March 18, 1999

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