By the end of the book Charley, or Charles, has put key members of the family into positions of great political power and has himself become chief of staff to the reelected President of the United States.
Condon attacked his targets, usually gangsters, financiers, and politicians, wholeheartedly and with a uniquely original style and wit that make almost any paragraph from one of his books instantly recognizable.
Reviewing one of his works in the International Herald Tribune, the well-known playwright George Axelrod (The Seven-Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter), who had collaborated with Condon on the screenplay for the film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, wrote: "The arrival of a new novel by Richard Condon is like an invitation to a party.... the sheer gusto of the prose, the madness of his similes, the lunacy of his metaphors, his infectious, almost child-like joy in composing complex sentences that go bang at the end in the manner of exploding cigars is both exhilarating and as exhausting as any good party ought to be.
In Glory, however, he returns to being his usual omniscient narrator, giving the reader: [While making love] Charley felt a jolt of high voltage electricity run through his body, starting deep inside and spreading out simultaneously to the roof of his head as if a horned ibex had leaped from his stomach and crashed into his skull.
The real-life Heller was a television director in New York City in the 1950s, '60s, and 70s, who initially lived on Long Island and then moved to a house on Rockrimmon Road in Stamford, Connecticut.
But readers with a taste for rough-edged satire will find considerable pleasure along the way—in the vitriolic swipes at US politics (""dear old coot"" Reagan above all), in the cheerfully grim mayhem, and in Condon's inventive and literally tasty prose.
"")[6]The New York Times definitely liked it: The plot gives Mr. Condon ample elbow room for political and social satire that is always funny....Toward the end things take an unexpectedly serious turn and a touch of tragedy leavens the humor, a feature of the Prizzi novels that works perfectly here.