This the first Tom Wolfe novel I have read and while it had good moments, especially several of the Conrad chapters, I felt that it ended like an unfinished thought. The epilogue was a weak way to settle the story and I would have preferred to hear final thoughts from the individual characters. The balance between staging, narrative and resolution was inadequate. The story began to fall down at the point where Charlie and Conrad arrived at Turpemtine which, in itself, lacked explanation and credibility. I am not sure what happened that caused Wolfe to truncate all of the story arcs at that point.

Other minor details bothered me. The location of the Croaker foods in El Cerrito is impossible–at best the warehouse would have been in the Richmond annex but probably north in Richmond. Wolfe clearly had little idea of bay area geography and locality. It is disappointing to see incorrect details about an area you know because it leads to to suspect the accuracy of other details that are less familiar.