Until about three quarters of the way through [Captains and the Kings] I more or less knew what I should be writing about. Now I am not so sure. It seemed to be one of those capacious dramatic tales of the American dollar dream in the tradition of The Magnificent Ambersons, The Great Gatsby or Citizen Kane. 'Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh was thirteen years old when he first saw America through the dirty porthole on the steerage deck of The Irish Queen. It was the early 1850's and he was a penniless immigrant, an orphan cast on a hostile shore to make a home for himself and his younger brother and infant sister.' And he does, although the brother turns out to be a homosexual concert tenor and the sister a nun. Joseph's childhood humiliation makes him bitter and his bitterness makes him cruelly determined. His mania...