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So Charlie is hauled into PlannersBanc for a humiliating session known as a "workout." What follows is probably the most riveting fictional scene ever set in a bank conference room, although the competition is admittedly scarce. From his former status as one of PlannersBanc's most-courted customers, Charlie has fallen to the level of "s___head," an arrogant deadbeat who must be bullied out of his profligate habits and set on the course of fiscal prudence. As a grudging sop to the ravenous bankers, Charlie decrees a 15% cut in the work force of another of his enterprises, Croker Global Food.
Across the continent, in Oakland, Calif., Charlie's decision falls like doom on Conrad Hensley, 23, the married father of two who has a $14-an-hour job on the night shift hauling frozen food out of a Croker Global warehouse to waiting delivery trucks. Conrad is someone new in a Wolfe novel, a totally good person who wants nothing more out of life than to buy a modest condominium for his family and establish a well-ordered, bourgeois existence. After the most riveting fictional scene ever set in a 0[degree]F freezer unit--here the competition is nonexistent--Conrad learns that he has been laid off, a catastrophe that drives him innocently and mistakenly but also inexorably into the vividly described hellhole of the Alameda County jail.
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 friends no longer see her, "a superfluous woman," at all.
The linchpin to all the subplots is Roger White II, 42, an impeccably dressed light-skinned black partner in the venerable Atlanta law firm of Wringer Fleasom & Tick. The nickname he picked up at Morehouse College, Roger Too White, reflected his disdain for all the campus talk about black separatism. But his old Morehouse friend and fraternity brother Wesley Dobbs Jordan is now the mayor of Atlanta. That connection explains why Roger is asked to represent Georgia Tech's All-American running back, Fareek ("the Cannon") Fannon.
The racial turmoil portrayed in Bonfire was up front and confrontational and stomping on the streets. Atlanta, as Wolfe portrays it, handles this problem a lot differently. Fareek is a fairly typical contemporary phenomenon, a loutish, sullen, spoiled athlete wearing diamond ear studs and, Roger observes, "a gold chain so chunky you could have used it to pull an Isuzu pickup out of a red clay ditch." Fareek is also a local Atlanta boy who climbed to fame from a poor black neighborhood. And he has now been accused, though not yet formally charged, of date rape by the daughter of one of Atlanta's most powerful white businessmen, Inman Armholster, who happens to be Charlie Croker's closest friend.