The Bonfire of the Vanities

When I first read this book I considered it brilliant. It was part of my Top 10 Personal Pantheon for a long time. It was so daring, so edgy. Like Wolfe's finest non-fiction, you felt that he was right there, reporting from the place where everything was happening.

The next time I read this was ten years or so later. It was still good, but it was no longer GREAT.

Last night, I realized that now I kind of hate it. At the time I admired Wolfe for exposing that everyone has ulterior motives, that no one is pure. And now I think back on it and find nothing edgy at all. It's rather reactionary, really. Wolfe couldn't be more conservative if he tried. All the married men either have mistresses or want to. All the wives are absorbed in their show more children and social standing. Only single ladies are sexy. Everyone is a total cliched bastard. Oh, and the race portrayals are even worse. Mentally I can hear Wolfe grousing about the liberal media when he depicted a victim made into a hardworking, promising student. But isn't his own cliche even more trite with the scary young black man in the urban jungle?

Just thinking about it now makes me shudder. I enjoyed Wolfe's nonfiction enormously, but the older I get, the more clearly his fiction looks awful to me. He wanted to do (I think) something grand and sweeping in the manner of Dickens, showing the lowest and the highest of society. But he's such a cynical writer, than he finds it impossible to empathize with anyone, except perhaps the drunken ex-pat. And unlike Dickens, there's no humanity anywhere. There's a lot of slick cleverness , but really, he might just as well have written "everyone's a phony and everyone sucks" and had done with it.

2/3/10 show less

I read this book in the 80s as a satire of the moment.
Now it is a historical document of how we got to this place.
Try rereading this book about the eighties in our current times and political situation. The POV of this novel is only from white men--the bonds salesman, the assistant district attorney, the British tabloid writer. There are other characters--white women and black men. But their POV doesn't matter, this is all Master of the Universe entitlement. Women are either "Social X-rays" or "Lemon Tarts." Every scene involving one of these white men and a woman first describes her in terms of her sexuality and desirability via the white male. The hubris of these white men who can get away with practically anything sound an awful lot show more like the New York world of Trump. Or the campuses of Yale or Maryland prep schools for that matter. Black and brown people barely register except en masse as protestors, or as background characters--the shoeshine man, the maid, the boy who is knocked down and left in a coma. show less

I read this book (quite accidentally, I might add) in the wake of the Zimmerman trial in Florida and found it really interesting, if also really depressing. With the possible exception of the comatose victim, there's not a redeemable character in the book--they're all despicable, some just slightly more than others. I list the victim as a "possible" exception because truly part of the point of the book is that the story of what happened is so hopelessly garbled by the press and the activists and the court system that the truth can't possibly come out in any recognizable form. Since we're never actually in the victim's head, for all we know, he could be the worst villain of them all. Wolfe's remarkable ability to turn a phrase and his show more gift for characterization are on full display here, and despite knowing that it's all going to end badly, it's impossible not to slog through with the characters to find out how, exactly, it IS going to end. show less

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Wealthy bond trader Sherman McCoy is having an affair and while picking up his mistress from the airport, gets into an accident, hitting a black teenager and leaves the scene. In this spectactular takedown of the obscenely coddled 80s new wealth scions, Wolfe skewers just about everything the Me Decade had to offer. As the authorities close in on McCoy, his personal life falls to pieces, he becomes distracted from his job and, God forbid, the other spoiled ultrarich parents refuse to speak to him at the bus stop where they wait to send their equally spoiled children to ridiculously overpriced private kindergartens.

Meanwhile, clergyman Reverend Bacon, senses an opportunity to exploit show more the tragedy for his own financial gain. Assistant DAs attempt to further their own careers, mostly to impress jurors of the opposite sex. And no one really seems to give a damn about the young man hit by the car, saint though he be not.

It's all here, the sleaze, the money, the racial real politik, the greed for more power. This novel is rightly called a portrait of the 1980s, no other work coming close to presenting the foibles so clearly. That it could become such a horrendous film is almost a perfect example of what it speaks to: the soulless corporate pursuit of money and power above all else, damn the consequences. Told in Wolfe's journalistic voice, it reads like a Matt Taibi diatribe from Rolling Stone magazine. Sometimes, when the budget-strapped prosecution is confronted with a defendant of immense wealth, your best strategy is to run out the clock until the defendant's bank accounts are empty. Once the man has no money, no one, not even his own lawyers, want to talk to him anymore. Money talks. Period. show less

Disclaimer: I was given a free copy of this audiobook via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Wolfe’s Dickensian tale of New York in the 1980s remains compelling, insightful and affecting four decades later. This Babylon of the 20th century is full of egoists and the self-interested; no one acts in good faith, no one is worthy of redemption, and the guilty are semi-arbitrarily picked out of a crowd of the awful.

The one true love found in this book – that of a father for his daughter – is destroyed with as little thought or care as a snowflake on the warm ground.

There are pointed references to Poe and “The Masque of the Red Death”, and this is certainly a story in which the rich find they can’t keep the world out.

A show more reminder, in case it were needed in 2024, that America is a land of shits. show less

“Your self…is other people, all the people you're tied to, and it's only a thread.”

High flying Wall Street bond dealer and self-styled Master of the Universe, Sherman McCoy, is conducting a clandestine affair with Maria, the sexy young wife of an ageing multi-millionaire. One evening after telling his wife that he's working late, Sherman collects Maria from the airport but, in a moment of inattention, he finds himself stuck in the wrong lane on the freeway and lost in the depths of the Bronx. As they drive around ever more frightening streets trying to find a way back to Manhattan, a young African American boy is accidentally knocked down by their car. They drive away in their panic, unaware of the injuries that the boy has show more suffered, and return to their insulated life within wealthy, white New York.

Sherman wants to report the incident but Maria over-rules him saying that she doesn't think that they will hear anything more about it. However, Henry Lamb, has been badly injured. Having attended hospital for treatment of a badly hurt wrist he returns home where he complains of head pains, and subsides into a coma. A radical activist in the African American community, Reverend Bacon, desperate for a crusade gets involved in the case. Bacon is determined to use Lamb's case as a cause célèbre. As demands for justice for the stricken boy gathers pace, McCoy's seemingly secure existence begins to disintegrate.

Meanwhile, Peter Fallow, a particularly odious and struggling British journalist, finds himself being given a string of exclusives about the case as the activists harness the tabloid press to forward their cause. Fallow gradually finds his fortunes waxing as McCoy's wane.

There are no heroes in this book. Everyone, except poor Henry Lamb, is seen to be tainted and self-serving to some degree. Sherman McCoy, indeed, emerges as one of the nicer characters. He at least recognises that he has, inadvertently, done something dreadful and the hollowness of his previous existence but ultimately is unable to change courses. He becomes a pitiable character incapable of choosing the correct advice to take. There are a number of other memorable characters, in particular Thomas Killian, McCoy's lawyer, and Supreme Court Justice Myron Kovitsky, all of them are flawed in some way but Wolfe only illuminates them briefly before reverting back to McCoy.

Wolfe wonderfully captures the racial tensions and jealousies between the two communities, the gilded but seemingly hollow lives of the super-wealthy but directs most of his satire against the vagaries of the American criminal justice system, where local District Attorneys and judges must seek periodic re-election against an increasingly volatile political landscape. Sherman McCoy becomes the ‘Great White Defendant’, the token box-ticking target every prosecutor yearns for.

Wolfe's writing is dazzling at times and his dialogue is fantastic. There are several funny scenes, particularly towards the end, with one in a restaurant being absolutely brilliant. All in all, I would highly recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys gripping character-driven satirical fiction but be warned the book is both long and hard to put down! show less

Charles Dickens is such a point of literary reference for me that I’m self-conscious about the comparison I draw between him and Tom Wolfe. Then again, Wolfe published this, his first novel, serially in a deliberate imitation of the Victorian master, so maybe it’s not all my imagination.

Wolfe shares a lot of Dickens’s talent for evoking the inanity of his pompous, self-absorbed characters without descending to outright cruelty. His prose is witty and sharp, and rewards close attention as he twines together the lives of three disparate men — a pampered Wall Street WASP whose love divides between his daughter and his side piece, an ambitious Jewish assistant district attorney in a perpetual hunt for fame and women, and an show more alcoholic British tabloid writer as devoid of morality as he is of respect for the Yanks.

An incident in the Bronx sucks all three into the Kafkaesque meat grinder at the nexus of the American courts, press, and politics. If this novel is about anything at all, perhaps it’s a social commentary on how little justice has anything to do with the media circus we call the American criminal justice system. As Wolfe writes, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.

That said, this isn’t really a novel about liberals and conservatives and who’s right and who’s wrong and how the system is broken and The Man is out to get you. The poverty-stricken defendants funneled through Bronx courtrooms on conveyor belts aren’t innocent victims of an unjust system — however absurd that system, they’ve made awful choices and done awful things.

Also, their liberal advocates are just as cynical and self-serving as any of the so-called conservative socialites on Park Avenue. To that extent, Wolfe can also write (as he does) that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.

So what is this novel? Along with its Dickensian roots, it also reminds me of William Thackeray’s 19th-century novel “Vanity Fair,” a work he gleefully subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” That’s exactly what we have here: a slice of New York City in the late 1980s where everyone’s on the make, on the take, and a legend in their own minds — but nowhere else.

In summary, Wolfe is what you would get if Dickens or Thackeray were Americans writing in the late 20th century about small-minded white men with foul mouths and huge egos, masters of the universe until the universe decides to remind them just how precariously human they are. If nothing else, this novel is a beautiful act of arson, heaping up all the vanities of American self-righteousness and torching them in a bonfire as hugely entertaining as it is perceptive. show less