Candy Christian is the central protagonist. Like Candide, she is a young naif, a willing victim of all the "-isms" and fads abroad (and well touted) in an age of rapid transit and instant communications. Her favorite expressions are backwoods middle-class provincial exclamations: "Darn" and "Gosh" and "Good Grief." She is repeatedly the victim of every con-man in her vicinity, all of whom preach some supposedly pious and self-serving species of so-called "contemporary ethics." In such a novel, there are only two classes of character: the foolish Candy and a herd of knaves. For the rest, incident clearly plays a more dominant role than does character, as is frequently the case in fast-paced satiric novels.