Word: atlanta
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What remained constant in Wolfe's mind throughout this creative marathon was a tour two Atlanta friends had given him back in 1989 of the plantations of southwest Georgia, immense tracts of property, dotted with sumptuous homes and extensive outbuildings, maintained at staggering expense by the superrich for the principal reason of shooting quail in season between Thanksgiving and the end of February. "I look for milieu first," Wolfe says, "the setting of a story before the story itself, and I was astonished at those plantations, their psychological location in the past and the tremendous amount of conspicuous consumption required...
Those expecting another Bonfire may be disappointed--the new novel is better. It's not quite as glitzy and brash and hilariously in-your-face as its predecessor, but then Atlanta in the late '90s, where most of the action occurs, is a more well-mannered place than New York City was in the '80s. The same bloodlusts--sex, money, status--rage in the New South as they do everywhere else; it just takes a little more digging to find them. Wolfe does, of course, but among all the animal appetites that are slaked or comically thwarted during the novel...
...adventure takes off from Turpmtine--the local Georgia pronunciation of the product once derived from the pinetree resin harvested there. The 29,000 acres of this plantation belong to Charlie Croker, 60, a high-stakes Atlanta real estate developer with a second wife 32 years his junior and an arthritic knee, a relic from his days of playing football for Georgia Tech. Among his many earthly possessions, Turpmtine is by far Charlie's most cherished; he sees it as a validation not of his wealth but of something deeper: "You had to be man enough to deserve a quail plantation...
Unfortunately, our Charlie Croker is also a man in trouble. His latest development, a grandiose tower named Croker Concourse, is undertenanted and hemorrhaging money. He owes PlannersBanc in Atlanta $515 million and an assortment of other lenders $285 million more, and he can't even meet interest on all that debt, never mind repay the principal...
...mess and thinks he may be able to dip surreptitiously into all that sloshing debt. Then there is Martha Croker, 53, still reeling from the breakup of her nearly 30-year marriage to Charlie. Now that she is no longer seen on the arm of her husband, her old Atlanta friends no longer see her, "a superfluous woman...