Everything and More Author:Geoff Nicholson Consumption and sex are among the witty Nicholson's enduring preoccupations: The Food Chain (1993) poked fun at culinary and sexual excess; Hunters and Gatherers took on collectors' obsessiveness; lust and gluttony are major motifs here as well. The title is the motto of "London's, and probably the world's most prestigious and most expensive dep... more »artment store," Haden Brothers, a nine-story behemoth modeled on Brueghel's painting of the Tower of Babel. The narrative tours this paradise along two tracks: one traces a confrontation in the store's penthouse between the sole remaining Haden brother--misanthropic, randy Arnold--and Vita Carlisle, a young store employee who's come to their tryst wearing three sticks of dynamite; the other offers flashbacks of the months since the store hired Carlisle and a hapless college-educated furniture porter named Charlie Mayhew. Nicholson's minor characters--slimy personnel manager Derek Snell, paramilitary security chief Ray Chalmers, Anton Heath, the anarchist-wanna-be foreman of the work-averse porters, and Vita's kleptomaniac mother, who worked for the store herself years ago--are small Dickensian gems, and Nicolson's clockwork emporium provides a vivid setting for this very British yet universal comedy of modern manners and morals.« less