Condon has no peer in his special universe of pungent wit and his satirical view of human frailty. Following his smash hit success, Winter Kills, Richard Condon marches on. With his extraordinary ear-to-the-groundswell skill, he fingers, in his new novel, America’s obsession number one – next to which sex is a mere hobby – Money: in all its ramifications; inflation, the stock market (here the dinner plate market) and most sensationally the carnal intimacy between money and human morality.

 

With the calling of the Ninth Joint Commission on the Evaluation of Sin, composed of the fallen and risen angels, invented by man to shoulder responsibility for his ethical life, meeting at old, long-gone, Liederkranz Hall on 57th Street aided by a raunchy crew from the Greek pantheon (Zeus as a horny Municipal Court Judge) – Condon sets in motion a field study into money which is his funniest, maybe his best humored novel ever.

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As his angelic crew intervenes in the life of super insurance salesman Gene Quebaro to study the mysterious thing called money which so unsettles their human clients, Condon deftly skewers the use man makes both of money and his own immortal gods. In Carlotta Quebaro, Condon has also painted his greatest super-heroine, who achieves, by her passion for her husband, what no mortal has managed: not only contact across to the Infinite to refute the indignity of death itself, but a contract with the Infinite to take her worldly goods with her.

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All the immortals ever wished to know about the meaning of money – to these lung fish who walked out of the water to call themselves human beings- is here, hilariously designed for all lung fish readers.