SOURCE: “Honor Amid the Ruins,” in American Spectator, Vol. 32, No. 1, January, 1999, pp. 64–68.

In the following review of A Man in Full, O'Sullivan compliments Wolfe's comic set-pieces and looks at the novel's general critical reception in an attempt to identify the basic theme of the work.

“Nothing has been lost save honor,” said the great nineteenth-century swindler Jay Gould about one of his failed enterprises. And the remark has not lost its power to shock and amuse. It derives its hard cynical charge from the fact that most people in most ages feel a natural concern about their reputation both in their own eyes and in those of the world. It inspires them to perform decent, even heroic, acts and restrains them from selfish or ignoble ones. And if we should act ignobly, then conscience rebukes us. We are, so to speak, honor-bound.

For that reason the man who...