In a word: Excellent

My first encounter with Tom Wolfe was The Right Stuff. I don't remember whether I saw the movie first or not. I do remember not buying the book for a long time because the cover was so dull. When I finally did I was amazed.

Many others (including Wolfe) have defined his "new journalism" better than I can. I'll just say that Wolfe has an ability to seamlessly weave himself right into the story. No, he isn't a character, but you get the feeling that he was perched somewhere watching every scene he describes. And his words are so artistic and dense with details and imagery and ideas that it's easy to imagine yourself perched there along with him.

That being said, somehow it took me 10 years to read another of his books (Bonfire of the Vanities). And another 5 to get to A Man in Full.

All of the techniques that brought The Right Stuff to life proved to work just as well with fiction. In A Man in Full, Wolfe transports us into the tiny sliver of society that owns quail hunting farms and keeps original artworks in their personal Gulfstream jet. But there are also sidetrips to prison, blue-collar families, stoicism, Atlanta racial politics, real estate and banking (sounds dull, but it's interesting, I swear!), second (younger) wives, and the downfall of a certain quail-hunting, jet-owning former jock megalomaniac real estate developer.

And you feel like Wolfe has lived a lifetime in everyone one of those environments. It is almost 800 pages, but I would have gladly taken another 200 to wind it down a little more gracefully. The ending is a little too neat and abrupt. It is hard for me to imagine finding a better book than this.

BTW, Bonfire was very good too, but not as amazing as AMIF.