The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

9. Placing the Postsouthern “International City”: Atlanta in Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full

9. Placing the Postsouthern “International City”: Atlanta in Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full The publication of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full in November 1998 focused attention upon Atlanta as Anne Rivers Siddons’s Peachtree Road, for all its popularity, never did—indeed, as no novel had since Gone with the Wind. A little over ten years earlier, Wolfe’s ambitious and commercially successful debut novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) had been heralded for its “brilliant evocation of New York’s class, racial, and political structure in the 1980s.” When news emerged that Wolfe’s long-awaited follow-up would similarly analyze the social forces at work in Atlanta, and that the U.S. hardback first edition print run would be 1.2 million copies, there was a sense that this was more than a merely literary phenomenon. A Man in Full was a cultural and economic event, and nowhere more so than in Atlanta itself.1 At one level, A Man in Full became prime cultural capital: local boosters saw the novel as a tool to promote tourism and their own image of the “international city.” Despite prepublication rumblings about the novel’s controversial contents, the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau invited the author to breakfast because “[w]e have a cultural tourism initiative in this city [and w]e feel Tom Wolfe is certainly a major novelist with a blockbuster book coming out this fall.” As an example of how “[c]ultural tourism [was] winning out over a self-conscious image” in Atlanta, more than one booster noted how Savannah residents “forgot all the anger” toward John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) when “they saw how much tourism they were getting.” As sociologist John Shelton Reed observed, this was “the old Atlanta spirit!” Nor did it go unnoticed that Wolfe had turned his fictional focus upon Atlanta after his big book about New York, the “global city.” The Brooklyn-based cultural critic Nelson George chided Atlantans for expressing anxiety about A Man in Full: “Come on, now. Wolfe wrote about Atlanta like it was a major city in this world.”2 1. Quote from Publishers Weekly on the back cover of Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987; reprint, London: Picador, 1990). 2. Maria Saporta, “ACVB to Welcome Author of New Controversial Book,” Atlanta Journal- But in the months before publication, many civic leaders and boosters remained implacably worried that Wolfe’s novel would damage Atlanta’s carefully honed image as an “international city.” The Buckhead Coalition, a business group led by Sam Massell—the ex-mayor who had introduced the slogan “the world’s next great city” in 1971—withdrew Wolfe’s invitation to speak at their annual meeting when advance reports suggested that the novel was an exercise in “Buckhead bashing.” There was particular concern regarding rumors that Wolfe paid close attention to real-estate development. Commentators in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution speculated as to which of the local developers had provided the model for Wolfe’s mooted central protagonist. John Portman commented, “I’m sure his [Wolfe’s] characters are composites ,” while fellow “real estate baron Charles Ackerman, who met with Wolfe several times,” admitted that “[w]e’ve kidded about who’s in the book at parties .” But other developers were more obviously perturbed: Portman’s great rival Tom Cousins “refused to comment, remember[ing] how Wolfe skewered New York bond traders in The Bonfire of the Vanities” and fearing that Atlanta real-estate developers would su≠er a similar fate.3 The novel also prompted skeptical discussion about Atlanta’s continuing status as a literary “nonplace.” The city’s limited presence in southern and American letters jarred with its chiefly economic claims to “international” status. In his review of A Man in Full, Reed noted the contrast between the “World-Class, Major-League City” announced on signs at Hartsfield International Airport, and the paucity of fictional representations of Atlanta. Reed sagely noted that “all this coverage [of A Man in Full in the Journal-Constitution ] could only remind readers how long it has been since the last bestseller about this pushy, acquisitive New South city—which raises the question of why Atlanta produces or even attracts so few good writers, which raises the question of what ‘world-class’ really means.” In the Journal-Constitution itself, Constitution, 27 October 1998, B3; former city-planning director Leon Eplan quoted in...