Word: mccandless
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...took North Carolina native Don McCandless 13 months, several work crews and some $600,000 to restore his crumbling two-story colonial home in Granada to its former stately self. McCandless spared no effort or outlay to get the details of his planned retirement home perfect, including the master-bathroom Jacuzzi, the satellite TVs, and the regal 18-seat dinning room with its ornate hand-painted ceiling and decorative tiled floors...
...before McCandless had a chance to finish hanging all the paintings, Daniel Ortega of the leftist Sandinista Front was elected president on November 5, turning McCandless' retirement plans upside down. "I'm outta here; I'm gone," said the North Carolinian. "It wasn't supposed to happen like this; it's like someone rose from the dead...
...McCandless decided on election night to sell his dream home and leave the country, after the first vote returns showed Ortega poised for victory. Less than a week later, he had sold his home at a fire-sale price and left for Costa Rica...
...public relations. His clients include the Rev. Elton Ude, founder of the Wayne Fickert Bible College and leader of an evangelical movement in Africa, and a mining company interested in mineral deposits in the area where Ude is harvesting souls. A U.S. Senator is also involved, as is McCandless, who prepared the original geological reports of the site...
...action of the novel is restricted to the McCandless house, located in a Hudson River town not far from New York City. The design of the residence is carpenter's gothic, "a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions... a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing even on this small a scale." This description is a key to Gaddis' own architecture: a self-conscious scaling down of his earlier books, in which issues of decline and fraudulence were elaborately developed...