Summary
Tom Wolfe's novel stars a college football star turned millionaire businessman who, in late middle age, finds himself with a troublesome young wife and a mountain of debt. The cast includes Conrad Hensley, who gets in trouble with the law after losing his job; a black ex-athlete accused of raping a white girl; and the lawyer who represents him. This explosive, multihued novel about the tension in late 20th-century Atlanta involves illegal immigrants, prison life, shady real estate deals, trophy wives and the women they have replaced. Wolfe's first novel in 11 years was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Award. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.
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Media Reviews
"Tom Wolfe may be the hardest-working showoff the literary world has ever owned...[H]e is certainly the most gifted best-seller writer since Margaret Mitchell." -- Norman Mailer
-- New York Review of Books
"[A] simple story so loaded with sets and costumes it can hardly move....[I]ts narrative and characterisation are so wanting that it is hardly a novel at all." -- Rhoda Koenig
-- Literary Review
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group
Published date: 2001
Size: 6 x 9 inches
Weight: 1.6 pounds
Pages: 690
Publisher's Notes
The setting is Atlanta, Georgia — a racially mixed, late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 29,000 acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife, and a half-empty office complex with a staggering load of debt.
Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, idealistic young father of two, is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods warehouse near Oakland and finds himself spiraling into the lower depths of the American legal system.
And back in Atlanta, when star Georgia Tech running back Fareek “the Canon” Fanon, a homegrown product of the city’s slums, is accused of date-raping the daughter of a pillar of the white establishment, upscale black lawyer Roger White II is asked to represent Fanon and help keep the city’s delicate racial balance from blowing sky-high.
Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real estate syndicates — Wolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most admired novelist. Charlie Croker’s deliverance from his tribulations provides an unforgettable denouement to the most widely awaited, hilarious and telling novel America has seen in ages — Tom Wolfe’s most outstanding achievement to date.
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