Word: peepgass
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...into the slums with one seamless narrative. Current trends and ideas are summarized with pithy aphorisms: Exercise-crazed women become "Boys with Breasts" and get-rich-quick schemes induce "The Aha! Phenomenon." Wolfe entertains readers with his keen ear for dialect and penchant for Dickensian names like Armholster, Peepgass and Armentrout. And of course, when it comes to clothes, who but a dandy like Wolfe would note the difference between a twist-weave suit and a hard-finished worsted...
...tales do share many common features. First of all, the plots are strikingly similar. Charlie Croker's financial crisis sounds a great deal like Sherman McCoy's. In fact, each uses the same phrase, "hemorrhaging money," to bemoan his predicament. In both books middling professionals--Raymond Peepgass and Larry Kramer--rabidly attack Croker and McCoy, respectively, in efforts to advance their own shabby ambitions. The protagonists in both novels exacerbate their problems with costly affairs, and the two books also highlight the delicate racial politics of urban America...
Wolfe's novel is bound by the inevitably intertwining paths of Charlie and Conrad, but that circumference is swollen by a series of related subplots, conveyed through the thoughts of three other characters. Raymond Peepgass, 46, a senior loan officer at PlannersBanc, has an inside view of Charlie's financial 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...
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