Tycoon: A Novel - Hardcover

Pringle, Terry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0945575300 ISBN 13: 9780945575306

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1990

Synopsis

Stan Gaines, an ambitious young man from the wrong side of the tracks, works his way up the corporate ladder at the Brewster Drilling Company, stealing Billy Brewster's own lover along the way

About this title

Reviews

This literary, Texan soap opera featuring oil, ambition and sexual obsession reads as though its author overdosed on TV reruns of Dallas. Narrator Billy Brewster III, who loses his girl and a chunk of his family business to his rags-to-riches partner Stan Gaines, exudes a cynical detachment that eventually makes his soul-searching tiresome. Gaines, a brash oil-and-real-estate wheeler-dealer with a "Dale Carnegie manner" and a self-invented past, is never fully humanized though we learn about his Vietnam War experience and meet his mother, a pious, elderly eccentric. Pringle ( A Fine Time to Leave Me ) tosses in many ingredients one might encounter on prime time: a blustering patriarch, an oil baron having a long affair with his partner's wife, sex in unusual settings or positions, a burnt-out marriage and so forth. The first few chapters almost feel like a geyser, then sludge seeps in.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Billy Brewster, heir to the Brewster Drilling Company fortune, is considered among Abilene's blessed until Stanley Gaines, from across the tracks, moves in on his job, his family, and his girlfriend. Stan, driven and ambitious, gets the job, marries the girl, and begins systematically building his own corporation through deals and manipulation in Texas oil and real estate, using the Brewster name and fortune as entry into the business world. Meanwhile, Billy is quietly using Stan for his own personal gains. As deals and intrigues are revealed, a picture of the business and social climate that led to Texas's current financial crisis begins to unfold. Pringle has taken a plot that could easily be adapted to the Dallas TV series, added reality and humor, and created an entertaining tale of oil and businessmen that should be a hit with many readers.
-Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0945575300
• ISBN 13: 9780945575306
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1