Word: conrade
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Across the continent, in Oakland, Calif., Charlie's decision falls like doom on Conrad Hensley, 23, the married father of two who has a $14-an-hour job on the night shift hauling frozen food out of a Croker Global warehouse to waiting delivery trucks. Conrad is someone new in a Wolfe novel, a totally good person who wants nothing more out of life than to buy a modest condominium for his family and establish a well-ordered, bourgeois existence. After the most riveting fictional scene ever set in a 0[degree]F freezer unit--here the competition is nonexistent...
Wolfe's novel is bound by the inevitably intertwining paths of Charlie and Conrad, but that circumference is swollen by a series of related subplots, conveyed through the thoughts of three other characters. Raymond Peepgass, 46, a senior loan officer at PlannersBanc, has an inside view of Charlie's financial mess and thinks he may be able to dip surreptitiously into all that sloshing debt. Then there is Martha Croker, 53, still reeling from the breakup of her nearly 30-year marriage to Charlie. Now that she is no longer seen on the arm of her husband, her old Atlanta...
...power of A Man in Full stems not simply from its reportorial accuracy; there is also the extraordinary sympathy Wolfe generates for his characters, particularly Charlie, Conrad and the abandoned Martha. Sympathy was a quality in short supply in much of Wolfe's early journalism, in which he allowed his subjects to embarrass or hang themselves through their meticulously quoted words. Witness Radical Chic, Wolfe's witheringly objective account of a 1970 fund-raising party for the Black Panthers held in the exquisite Manhattan apartment of the composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia, during which the journalist detailed both...
...speaks very softly, a hint of his native Richmond, Va., still audible in his vowels. "I also spent some time, although not much time, in a zero-degree freezer unit like the one Conrad works in in the novel." Did he actually witness firsthand a "workout" session such as the one Charlie endures at PlannersBanc? "No," he says in the tone of a reporter stymied. "I tried everything, promised to dress like a banker and keep quiet, but I never could get into one. Still, I have five sources for that scene, and I know I'm right...
This is not genre writing, agreeable trash to be pigeonholed. If salt-soaked comparison is required, O'Brian's adventures suggest Joseph Conrad's sea tales more than those of C.S. Forester and his Horatio Hornblower. Conrad's prevailing mood is darker; though O'Brian can summon darkness and defeat, he is more arch and owlish. But as Forester did, O'Brian novelizes serially. The precarious lives of two memorable characters, friends and shipmates, thread through his books...