Word: novelization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After Bonfire, though, came the inevitable question. What next? Topping his first novel would be hard, the risk of failure and I-told-you-so reviews high. But Wolfe found the challenge irresistible. "I was 57," he says, "and I thought the eight or nine years I'd spent on Bonfire had taught me what not to do the second time. So, I proceeded to make every blunder a beginning writer could stumble into...
...readers have had to wait 11 years for A Man in Full (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 742 pages; $28.95) and how demanding the self-imposed Wolfe regimen of putting that book together actually was. "First, I tried to take the easy way out by setting most of the new novel in Manhattan, the same locale I'd used in Bonfire. I didn't realize until 1995 that this approach wasn't working and that I was repeating myself. Second, I always recommend to people who ask me for helpful hints on writing that they start with an outline. Naturally, I didn...
...long last, where A Man in Full begins. The trip readers make from there to the end of the book will store up fuel for literary discussions and debates throughout, and probably beyond, the coming winter. The 1.2 million copies of its first printing, an astounding number for a novel not written by somebody named Clancy or Grisham, are heading toward the stores. And the book has already received a publicity boost that exceeds the power of purse strings: four weeks before the Nov. 12 publication date, A Man in Full was nominated for a 1998 National Book Award...
Those expecting another Bonfire may be disappointed--the new novel is better. It's not quite as glitzy and brash and hilariously in-your-face as its predecessor, but then Atlanta in the late '90s, where most of the action occurs, is a more well-mannered place than New York City was in the '80s. The same bloodlusts--sex, money, status--rage in the New South as they do everywhere else; it just takes a little more digging to find them. Wolfe does, of course, but among all the animal appetites that are slaked or comically thwarted during the novel...
...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--Conrad learns that...