Peter Applebome, New York Times, November 11, 1998.

NEW YORK — There was a moment after the salmon with Brittany sea salt at the pillowy corner banquette at the Carlyle, after the triumphant stroll up Madison Avenue, where East Side matrons swooned like teen-agers spying Leonardo DiCaprio, after the brief tour of the 12-room symphony of mahogany and double-beveled glass where he lives, when, out of the blue, Tom Wolfe sounded like a man ready to let his red dog slip its leash.

The untethered red dog in Wolfe’s new novel, “A Man in Full” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is a metaphor for breaking out of type, taking a mad dash on the wild side, as the novel’s cautious banker Raymond Peepgass does in cooking up a felonious get-rich scheme.

So it seemed so un-Wolfean as to be almost Wolfean when he began preaching the virtues of teaching his son to hunt, sounding like some old boy in muddy fatigues contemplating the apocalypse in Valdosta or Spartanburg…

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