Tom Wolfe's new novel, A Man in Full, arrives like its author all dressed up in the tailored white suit of a National Book Award nomination. Judging by the many accommodating reviews and the author's appearance on the cover of Time, the notion must be afoot that this is Wolfe's great book, that it represents an advance in his considerable achievements thus far, that it confirms Wolfe as our leading social chronicler and vindicates his famous plea for American novelists to stop their navel gazing and turn their attention to the world around them.

I am here to tell you that none of that is true.

A Man in Full displays all the usual Wolfeian gifts: his rhetorical energy, his biting satirical eye, his head for research, and his ability to sketch a broad canvas. The novel concerns Charlie Croker, an Atlanta real estate mogul plagued by a bad football knee and a mountain of debt from a disastrous commercial development called Croker Concourse. Croker (change the o to an a, add a c, and you get Cracker) is a great big redneck, ornery, bloated, bigoted, but also vital, manly, earthy, and physically courageous. The penman's envy of the man of action is evident in everything Wolfe writes about Croker. He never tires of mentioning "his massive neck, his broad shoulders, his prodigious forearms," and his "back like a Jersey bull." (Croker, we suspect, might even be able to lift this entire 742-page opus with one finger.)

Down on his 29,000-acre plantation, Turpmtine, Cap'm Charlie can catch rattlesnakes with his bare hands, but his own attempt to wriggle free of the grasp of PlannersBanc— to whom he owes $515 million— proves less successful. In a relentless scene early in the book, the "workout team" reduces Croker to the status of "shithead" and tells him, in no uncertain terms, to begin liquefying his assets to pay the bank back. Just as in The Bonfire of the Vanities, then, the central conflict Wolfe treats in A Man in Full, the human drama that most invigorates his powers (and the personal demon he may have tried to slay by writing this juiced-up book) is that of a rich man in peril of losing everything.

With Croker's predicament established, the other gears of the plot's complicated engine begin to engage. Also as in Bonfire, Wolfe has concocted a crime with dire racial implications. Elizabeth Armholster, daughter of leading white Atlanta businessman Inman Armholster, claims to have been raped by a black Georgia Tech football star, Fareek Fanon. Roger Too White, a black lawyer whose idol is the out-of-fashion Booker T. Washington, is hired to defend the running back. Hoping to keep the press from finding out about the matter, Roger goes to see the mayor of Atlanta, an old college buddy named Wes Jordan. One of the things I was surprised Wolfe did well in this book is his portrait of these two members of the "Morehouse elite." From middle-class upbringings, wildly successful in their careers, both men lack street credibility but are too honest and intelligent to pretend otherwise. They call each other "brother" ironically. They joke about being "blacker than thou." Wolfe no doubt overdoses it with Roger's British tailoring and love of Mahler, but he sketches here the lineaments of an emerging American identity: the postracial black. (For a while anyway. By the end of the book, unable to resist reverting to form, Wolfe has Roger get down with the brothers, while Jordan suntans to win the mayoral election against a darker-skinned opponent.)

The mayor tells Roger that his mission is hopeless: the press will find out, inevitably. Instead, he has another plan to protect Fanon from prosecution and the city from a race riot. What they need is someone from Atlanta's business community (meaning a powerful white person) to speak on behalf of Fanon and urge for calm. Who can they get? Charles A. Croker, of course. Business mogul, former Georgia Tech football star, known conservative. In return for Croker's assistance, the mayor will prevail upon PlannersBanc (which it just so happens enjoys the city's pension account) to stop repossessing Croker's assets and restructure his debt.

Croker's decision— will he betray his friend Inman Armholster to save his wealth?— keeps the pot boiling for the last 200 pages. The outcome of that decision, however, is determined by the book's third story line. This involves Conrad Hensley, a freezer-picker for Croker Global Foods out in California. Conrad is a character of almost sickening goodness and, like all heroes, he must be tested: he gets fired from his job, has his car impounded, beats up a tow-truck operator, and is thrown in the Santa Rita jail. This gives Mr. Wolfe a chance to tell us all about prison life, which he dutifully and exhaustively does. (Oddly enough, one theme that runs throughout A Man in Full is that of anal rape. It appears in the lyric "Ram Yo' Booty!" from a rap song played during Freaknic in Atlanta. It crops up in a country-metal song: "Gon' put my jimbo/Up yo' shanks akimbo." And it pervades the prison sections of the book, leading up to the actual rape of a character named Pocahontas. The connection between these two preoccupations— hemorrhaging cash and anal rape— cries out for a Freudian analysis.) Wolfe does a perfectly adequate job of depicting the Santa Rita jail but much of this information, from the niceties of prison tattooing to the racial turf warfare, is already familiar from other novels and films.

The coincidences of the 19th-century novels Wolfe so admires begin to pile up. Conrad asks his wife to send him a novel called The Stoics Game but receives instead The Stoics, a collection of the writings of Epictetus and company. In short order, he becomes a Stoic; an earthquake occurs, cracking the prison in two (Conrad takes the quake to be the work of Zeus when it is really the act of a desperate novelist). Conrad escapes, goes to Atlanta, finds another copy of The Stoics in a rented room, and, in a final synchronicity that might have made Dickens blush, ends up working as a home nurse for the ailing Charlie Croker, who has finally had that football knee operated on. I won't give away the ending except to say that it is entirely unsatisfying, trumped up, destroys the book's main achievement (by violating Croker's character), and sustains, I'm afraid, the suspicion that Mr. Wolfe, for all his narrative energies, doesn't know how to set those energies to rest. In Bonfire he resorted to a slapdash epilogue sketching the fates of his characters. Here he punts again in an epilogue where Wes Jordan tells Roger Too White what happened to whom. That's the last we see of Croker, just a tossed-off description of his strange doings. It feels mighty impolite of Wolfe, dismissing his hero that way.

The difficulties with Wolfe's novelistic method are as follows. He seems to begin not with a story so much as with discrete bundles of information. He visits Atlanta. He learns about plantation life. He goes out to California and researches a freezer-picking unit. Then he tries to construct a narrative to include all these pieces. It would be wonderful if it worked, fluidly and believably, but here it doesn't. Wolfe's didacticism intrudes on his dramatization. He will give you a convict speaking and then will explain the lingo to you in the next paragraph: ''Ev, bummahs, man, yeah, but you ever wen spahk da AK-47, da bullet clip, get s'koshi da kines?" He described a little curve in the air with his hand.

"Li'dat?" As Conrad had finally figured out, in Five-O's Hawaiian dialect, which was called Pidgin, spahk meant inspect or check out, s'koshi meant a little bit, and da kines meant that kind, like that, or like you know. The reader is constantly aware of this mediating presence (in an expensive white suit) letting him in on the facts.

More problematic, the inside information Wolfe presents is often not that informative. Of homeboy dress, Wolfe explains that the bandannas and baggy jeans worn without belts are "jailhouse fashions." This is not news, not even to me, a guy who spends all day in his room. Also, someone has got to point out the sloppiness in this book. On page 10 Wolfe writes of Armholster, "He loved . . . all those minions jumping every time he so much as crooked his little finger." Then, 35 pages later, Wolfe writes of a business executive, "He was surrounded by people who jumped whenever he crooked a finger. . . . " On page 501, we get "deep-green bushes, every leaf of which seemed waxed and polished by hand," and then, on page 697, there it is again: "deep green leaves, each one of which shone as if it had been waxed and polished by hand." Then there's the time when Croker's wife says, "I couldn't stand to see you . . . cringing like that." But flip back to the scene she's alluding to and, sure enough, she's not present! How, then, did she see him cringe?

You might think that a man who wears custom-tailored suits and big riverboat- gambler hats might not devise the best fictional rap lyrics in the world— and you would be in this surmise entirely correct. Here's a taste of Wolfe as Snoop Doggy Dogg:

Girl, Can't knock it, Say be limbo! Shanks akimbo! Hey! Yo! Bimbo! You unlock it! Gonna take it out my pocket

Limbo? Shanks akimbo? More strangely, the lyric "shanks akimbo" occurs not only in this rap song called "Chocolate Mecca" but in the aforementioned country-metal song, "Brain Dead." Is Wolfe making a connection between rap and country metal? Is this just a mistake? Surely not. But then there are all those sloppy repetitions. Each time this happens, you stop reading and think for a moment— not in a good way.

The quick skewering style that has served Wolfe well in his journalism is often at war with his material here. Time and again he tells the reader what to think. "Stunning!" he will say, in case you didn't get the point of the previous description. Occasionally, Wolfe will almost fly free of those tics. There is this riveting passage describing the mating of a stallion and a mare:

All at once the mare spread her haunches, opened her vulva wide, and seemed almost to squat. She was breaking down, abandoning her struggle, opening up unconditionally, surrendering utterly. At that moment the stud manager, his beard a brilliant red in the sunlight, his arms stretched out like wings, brought his hands together, slamming the heel of his right hand into the palm of his left with a tremendous smack! The stallion's handlers released their hold. The mare's handlers gave her back her foreleg. The stallion reared. His head, his wild eyes, his flared nostrils, his bared teeth, his huge neck, his forelegs, his massive chest rose up until the great beast appeared to be towering on tiptoe above the world.

However, unable to let things rest, Wolfe tacks on this unnecessary summation: "Sex! Lust! Desperate! Irresistible!"

Though you wouldn't expect it, some of the best writing in A Man in Full is in the pastoral mode. Wolfe, investigator of the political and financial machinations of urban America, shows here a country boy's affection for the flora of south Georgia.

Down below, for as far as you could see . . . stands of soaring longleaf pines with riots of white dogwood blossoms running through them . . . tawny fields of sedge, just beginning to turn green, interspersed with copses of already brilliant green spreads of beggarweed, Egyptian wheat, rye, oats, peas, and corn . . . huge groves of live oak, only just beginning to burst into leaf, so that you could make out the arthritic trunks and branches and the shaggy garlands of Spanish moss strung through them in immense ghostly gray strands. . . .

The Bonfire of the Vanities didn't attempt to present deep psychological portraits. Wolfe is mainly a satirist and his best depictions are comic. His work bears a resemblance to commedia dell'arte, where each character has his own well-known tics and mannerisms, his lazzi as the Italian has it. People complained about the cartoony characters in Bonfire but on the whole they were more captivating— with the exception of Croker— than the characters Mr. Wolfe has assembled here. Bonfire, written originally for serialization, has a drive and a manic energy which much of A Man in Full doesn't. The energy here is forced, manufactured by the synthetic adrenaline of a thousand exclamation points.

We expect the zeitgeist from Wolfe, but A Man in Full does not deliver the news in the uncomfortable, eye-opening ways Bonfire did. Before that book, no one had so baldly articulated the new xenophobia. "Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers! It's the Third World down there! Puerto Ricans, West Indians, Haitians, Dominicans, Cubans, Colombians, Hondurans, Koreans, Chinese, Thais, Vietnamese, Ecuadoreans, Panamanians, Filipinos, Albanians, Senegalese and Afro-Americans!" This was provocative and, to many, enraging stuff. Multiculturalism, like modernism, was a juicy target for Wolfe. Here he has no such sacred idols to destroy. We are aware of the racial problems of our cities, of the financial high jinks of our businessmen. Nothing has really happened in the '90s. They seem to be a continuation of the '80s, with more body piercing. If something significant has occurred, I did not discover it in Wolfe's new book. The lesser status of A Man in Full is reinforced by its host city. Atlanta's bid for greatness foundered in the explosions during the Olympic Games, a failure Wolfe curiously makes no mention of in this book, as though not wanting to detract from the importance of his setting.

Still, I am not unsympathetic to Wolfe's project. It would be great to do for America at the millennium what Tolstoy did for Russia in the 19th century. But Wolfe doesn't get inside people's heads the way Tolstoy did. Certainly, A Man in Full is an ambitious work. It wasn't written by a lazy or timid man. But it's entertaining rather than engrossing, instructive rather than revelatory, willed rather than imagined, sweated out rather than perfected.

Some years ago in Harper's, Wolfe enjoined American writers to "head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property." He has gone out into this hog-stomping land and has brought back not a work of art but many interesting journalistic facts. In the end, hitting the pavement won't necessarily lead you to the palace of literature. What matters in a novel is what's off the record.

Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of The Virgin Suicides.