The Golden Orange Summary
Joseph Wambaugh

The Golden Orange Summary

TheGolden Orange refers to Orange County, California, home of the very rich and the very weird. This area of California, including Newport Harbor, the Pacific coast, and Catalina Island, is magnificent, and many of its inhabitants are beautiful; but this paradise is fast being ruined by the greed of its multimillionaire businessmen and the women who set out to trap them for financial gain. Towns like Newport Beach are also polluted by drug addicts and other petty criminals.

Wambaugh is appalled by the gross materialism that has come to be identified with Orange County. Some of the funnier passages in the novel mock the Southern California yuppie lifestyle: grocery stores that sell white truffles at $1,600 dollars a kilo, individually wrapped white eggplants, and elephant garlic in little white nets; the diesel Mercedes Benz as a despised automobile fit only for employees running errands; women...

(read more from the Short Guide)