Though far more people have purchased it than have actually read it, David Foster Wallace’s weighty tome Infinite Jest announced a new era in modern literature: the return of the Big Books That Everyone Must Buy. Following Wallace’s opening salvo were virtual phone books by the likes of such luminaries as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Now comes the long-awaited new 742-pager by Tom Wolfe, a writer whose sole other novel, 1987's The Bonfire Of The Vanities, still stands as the grand assessment of the greed- and hypocrisy-intensive ‘80s. The people who read, and re-read, that book will find many familiar elements in A Man In Full. Too many, in fact. Like Bonfire, A Man In Full tackles such issues as race, class, envy, politics, and, yes, vanity in a time-bomb of a big city. Also like Bonfire, it features a wide range of characters—from aging real-estate tycoons with trophy wives to star football players accused of rape, to black lawyers and mayors derided for their concessions to Atlanta’s powerful white minority—whose stories gradually intertwine. Wolfe, ever the perceptive journalist, realizes that the South’s unique and colorful culture has been begging for a contemporary dissection, and that the socio-economic realities of Atlanta, the jewel of the South, makes a fresher target than such tired locales as New York City. Unfortunately, A Man In Full never rises to the occasion: Unlike Bonfire, the machinations of Atlanta’s powerful elite and the descriptions of their privileged lives are pretty uninvolving here. Really, who cares if arrogant multimillionaire Charlie Croker can save his estate, let alone his reputation? Only the plight of a tangentially involved laid-off warehouse worker inspires any sympathy, but like most of the supporting players, Wolfe just uses him as a catalyst for A Man In Full’s anticlimactic conclusion. Wolfe’s onomatopoeia-fixated prose, though entertaining, is repetitive, and the book is far too unfocused overall to leave much of an impression: It’s a solid 400 pages in before the wheels of complex character convergence have finally, stubbornly begun to turn. Yet when all the plotlines finally collapse together in a heap of carefully orchestrated coincidence, the payoff is more of a poof than a bang.