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PARTISAN REVIEW
instincts, his lack of cant; Roger Too White to his ambition and guilt
about being too white; Fareek Fanon to his celebrity status and origins in
poverty; Ray Peepgass, the middle-level bank executive, to his anxieties
about his loss of money and status; and all the women to their satellite
function in the lives of their husbands. Only the idealistic Conrad Hensley
is irreducible to his social status. The characters, clearly and vividly pre–
sented, lack the mystery and complexity of motive and behavior that we
find in the great realists.
And what of the moral dimension? Into a world of business tycoons,
technogeeks and technospeak, celebrity athletes and sex and violence, Wolfe
inserts a fable of stoic honor and self-acceptance. The young idealist of the
novel, Conrad Hensley, is made to suffer every possible indignity (unem–
ployment, victimization by callous authority, unjust imprisonment, the
threat and actuality of violence) as a test of the forti tude he has learned from
the great Roman slave Epictetus, whose book has fortui tously come into his
possession. The novel is graced with quotations from the Roman Stoic.
One of the disciples says, "How shall we discover, each of us, what
suits his character?"
Epictetus says, "How does the bull, when the lion attacks, discover
what powers he is endowed with? It is plain that each of us who has
power of this sort will not be unaware of its possession. Like the bull,
the man of noble nature does not become noble all of a sudden; he
must train through the winter and make ready, and not lightly leap
to
meet things that concern him not."
Wolfe glosses Epictetus through the reflections of Conrad. "Only
Epictetus...was a philosopher who had been stripped of everything,
imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, threatened with death. And only Epictetus
had looked his tormentors in the eye and said, 'You do what you have to
do, and I will do what I have to do, which is live and die like a man.' And
he had prevailed." Epictetus enters into the postmodern reality of the
novel as a fantasy of moral redemption. In a world in which people are
motivated by greed for money, fame, and status, Conrad is presented as a
successful Quixote, a Hercules with formidable biceps, son of Zeus
(Epictetus's God), who miraculously arranges Conrad's escape from prison
through an earthquake and his subsequent role as redeemer of Charlie
Croker, the man who had him and his fellow workers laid off. (Wolfe is a
great contriver of dramatic ironies.) Conrad teaches Croker, on the brink
of bankruptcy, to risk everything for the sake of honor. At the end of the
