A Man in Full

I love the way Wolfe brings one of the more arcane areas of the financial markets to life - namely bankruptcy workout - and skewers the greed and ambition of real estate investors in the 1990s.

I’m a huge admirer of Wolfe’s technique of writing a novel using journalistic interviews, and I’m struck by the way he nails the characters and actions when he describes how the bankruptcy process works. And all while keeping the reader absolutely hooked on the narrative.

I go back to Wolfe’s novels again and again, not just to be amused and entertained but to get… show more.

I lived in Atlanta for a while and this is a great novel about the New South. Reading this novel is like taking a master class in real estate investing.

As with every Tom Wolfe novel it is a huge sprawling book that explores where all classes and races that inhabit a huge city intersect. Charles Croker a prosperous real estate investor is deeply in debt but that doesn’t stop the demands of his much younger trophy wife. Race relations are shattered when Fareek Fanon a star running back for a local college is accused of raping a girl from… show more.

Read this – or anything by Wolfe, the writer who has had the most influence on me. Why? Because Tom Wolfe was what I aspire to be, a joyful explainer. He dropped himself into worlds he knew nothing about and let their most engaged players just talk. He came back with deep-inside tours of lives we would otherwise never know. In The Molecule of More, my co-author Dan Lieberman (one of the great psychiatric minds in America, I say) gave me a thrilling tour of neuroscience, leveraging my own interests as a playwright and a trained physicist so we… show more.

Tom Wolfe’s second novel shares similarities with The Last Stoic in that it looks critically at contemporary society through a Stoic lens.  One of the characters, Conrad Hensley, discovers the writings of Epictetus while in prison and imparts this wisdom to the corrupt and covetous Charlie Croker, turning his life upside down. He comes to realize the truth of Arius Didymus’ statement that “excessive impulses are disobedient to reason,” and are therefore detrimental. Written in Wolfe’s inimitable and lively style, the book makes a powerful indictment on the preoccupations of our age: appetite and fear.