Author: Charles Gaines

Publisher:

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

"Kenneth Dangler, a very rich young WASP -- educated at Andover and Harvard, married to the equally rich, capricious Erica - -has settled on a business scheme with a certain "pith and moment" to it: Dangler's International Adventures Camp, in northern New Hampshire. Guests, all lilywhites of the rulingest class, pay $2000 a week to wrestle a tame bear, ride whitewater rapids (the bottom of the canoe is tracked to an underwater channel, so the danger is only illusory), and confront a carefully modified wilderness. But Andrew Cobb, an old schoolmate of Dangler's who is hired as the camp lawyer, watches while Dangler's aims embolden and his mission takes on serious intent: Dangler is now determined to toughen the rich so that they can re-take control of society. So he begins to make his wilderness encounters truly dangerous -- no more playacting. A Winter Expedition up the steep local mountain is the climax, with a very hokey, melodramatic turn -- a doublecross by the resort manager (who's dazzled by Dangler's wife Erica) -- that puts everyone in real life-and-death danger. Gaines (Stay Hungry) doesn't quite decide what he wants this book to be -- a Gatsby-ish meditation on the rich? a Thomas McGuane-like satire, aAla The Sporting Club? -- until rather late in the game. But by that time his strongest suit -- action writing -- has taken over and the winter climb on the icy slopes is legitimately gripping. With obvious indebtedness to films like Westworld: a sometimes overly ambitious and snide but generally taut novel, full of rich, if derivative, cinematic potential."--Kirkus