a graduate also of Georgia Law, a devotee of Western aesthetics, the first
non-Caucasian to be a partner at Wringer, Fleasom & Tick, and probably
the best-dressed man in the South—or the North, too, with the exception of
Tom Wolfe. Like Wolfe, he knows clothes and their labels, exquisite auto-
mobiles, furniture and interior decor, and the history of architecture; al-
though White is modest and careful in public, the world knows that he
knows what is good in the material world.
Except for his Wyeth and his Turpmtine, and perhaps his riding boots,
Charlie, possessor of so much, is actually rather indifferent. Both his wives
have burdened him with things he cares little about, except when they get
in his way. He has indulged the women with their dreams of delight, but to
demonstrate his power rather than enjoy material delights himself. Now,
however, Charlie approaches his own Alamo. A few years before, he had
borrowed billions in a brash move to extend Atlanta’s suburban satellites
to the far north, way up into Cherokee County, at the end of I-, which is
not a loop or ring road but a dead-ending four-laner into the hills. Charlie
had built edge cities above downtown before. (Wolfe actually cites Joel Gar-
reau’s paeon,Edge City, in the novel’s text.) Now he would top everyone with
a multiuse development crowned with an office tower named for himself:
Croker Concourse. Charlie’s timing was bad, however, and as his enormous
banknotes come due, Croker Concourse is percent vacant. A special
team of his bank—a ‘‘workout’’ crew—call him to heel, then send deputies
to confiscate his- and its precious artwork. What to do?
Charlie cannot give up his food distribution business—justification for
the Internal Revenue Service that Turpmtine was an experimental farm.
Desperate and in hope that any economy in his business empire would
show good faith to the bank, Charlie orders a percent layoff of Croker
Foods employees. One of the thousands to get his notice the next day is a
young Californian, Conrad Hensley, who, hundreds of pages later, will con-
verge with Charlie himself in Atlanta and settle many matters great and
small.
Conrad is twenty-three years old, mild of temperament, hard working,
physically brave but rather hapless, married to a discontented young wife,
and the father of two. Briefly a community college student, Conrad experi-
enced a shining week of recognition in a literature class taught by a gener-
ous and imaginative professor. Then his domestic circumstances sent him
off to work full time in the Suicidal Freezer Unit at Croker’s warehouse near
Oakland. There the slightly built youth acquired enormous arms, wrists,
and hands hoisting eighty-pound packages of frozen food. The workers’