Tom Wolfe

Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. "No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" (The National Review) “A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy.” (The New Republic)

A Novel

The Bonfire of the Vanities

Sherman McCoy is a WASP, bond trader and self-appointed 'Master of the Universe'. He has a fashionable wife, a Park Avenue apartment and a Southern mistress. His spectacular fall begins the moment he is involved in a hit-and-run accident in the Bronx. Prosecutors, newspaper hacks, politicians and clergy close in on him, determined to bring him down. The Bonfire of the Vanities is a caustic satire on the money-feverish Eighties. This exuberant novel cemented Wolfe's reputation as the foremost chronicler of his age.

Sarah Christine Gill

I decided I would use such a Situation in my book. It was here that I began to run into not Roth's Lament but Muggeridge's Law. While Malcolm Muggeridge was editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy, pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn business of a state visit. 

Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

He made a statement that had a terrific impact on other young writers. We now live in an age, he said, in which the imagination of the novelist lies helpless before what he knows he will read in tomorrow morning's newspaper. 

“The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist.”

Even today - perhaps especially today - anyone, writer or not, can sympathize. 

What novelist would dare concoct a plot in which, say, a Southern television evangelist has a tryst in a motel with a church secretary from Babylon, New York - Did you have to make it Babylon? - and is ruined to the point where he has to sell all his worldly goods at auction, including his air-conditioned doghouse - air- conditioned doghouse? - whereupon he is termed a 'decadent pompadour boy' by a second television evangelist, who, we soon learn, has been combing his own rather well-teased blond hair forward over his forehead and wearing headbands in order to disguise himself as he goes into Louisiana waterbed motels with combat-zone prostitutes- Oh, come on- prompting a third television evangelist, who is under serious consideration for the Republican presidential nomination, to charge that the damning evidence has been leaked to the press by the Vice President of the United States... while, meantime, the aforesaid church secretary has now bared her chest to the photographers and has thereby become an international celebrity and has gone to live happily ever after in castle known as the Playboy Mansion ... and her erstwhile tryst mate, evangelist No. 1, was last seen hiding the fetal position under his lawyer's couch in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

What novelist would dare dream up such crazy stuff and then ask you to suspend your disbelief?

An american epic, the title says it all. 

g.m.

Vanda

A very uncomfortable and dark book, and definitely a worthwhile read.

Andrew John Kinney

Some great writing here. This is my second favorite Wolfe book after The Right Stuff.

Jonas Maaløe

Tom Wolfe never really disappoints, and this this book is no different. Although fictional it reads like New Journalism and in it Wolfe traverses through the social classes of New York City, undressing each of them through his laser focused observation. It's long, though, and the intricate desriptions of lapels and shoes can sometime be a bit of a slog, but the effort is well worth it in the end.

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I picked up this book after seeing it on Mental Floss's 25 Most Influential Books list and I was not disappointed. Wolfe crafts a tale of greed, ambition, and the corruptable essence of human nature. 

This is the story of a rather unlikeable bond trader, Sherman McCoy. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth and currently the top trader at an elite firm, Sherman felt invincible. Despite making $1 million a year, living in a $3 million "apartment" (at 1980's prices), nothing satisfies him. Certainly not his spoiled, social-ladder climbing wife, nor his equally spoiled daughter. The self-described Master of the Universe adds a mistress to his collection and this is where his real troubles begin.

In a city that barely has a lid on seething racial tension, enter Rev. Bacon. Bacon is a rabble-rouser in a suit and has his hands in several questionable deals. But, when a white couple in a Mercedes hits a black youth with their car and then speeds away, Bacon uses racial tension to escalate things and prods the DA's office into action. Sadly, Bacon's claim that the DA would handle the case differently if a white Park Ave youth had been the victim of black drivers is likely all too true. However, Bacon's interest in the case is purely self-serving and he uses it as a platform for self-aggrandizement. It made me wonder which real-life personaility the author modeled Bacon after.

Sherman and his mistress of course are the white couple in the Mercedes. On his way back from picking up mistress Maria, Sherman becomes lost in the Bronx and is waylaid by 2 would-be highway robbers. Sherman gets out of the car to remove an obstacle the youths put in the road so that he could drive away. As one of the youths approaches, Sherman panics and throws the obstacle at him. Maria takes the driver's seat, Sherman jumps in the car, and as Maria speeds away, she sideswipes one of the youths, Henry Lamb. Lamb ends up in a irreversable coma. From that point on, Sherman's life takes a nose-dive as he becomes the poster boy for white excess, greed, and priviledge and is portrayed as a real-life example of an upperclass white attitude that poor people (especially poor black people) are disposable. 

Sherman is crucified in the press at the hands of a pompous, alchololic yellow journalist, his mistress abandons him and leaves him to take the heat, the DA's office just needs a conviction to quiet the mob and salivates over casting the elitist white super-rich guy as the perp, his wife offers him little support (no wonder) and his parents view him as an embarrassment. Despite all of his flaws, Sherman McCoy becomes a bit likeable as his weakensses end up turning him into a victim. He is prosecuted for a crime he didn't commit because it's politically expedient for the DA and will help his bid for re-election.

It is a testament to Wolfe's talent that he can create so many unlikeable characters and yet have the reader feel sympathy for many of them. Most of the characters spend the majority of their efforts trying to get ahead, concerned only for themselves, and single-mindedly pursuing their quest for more, more, more. Nothing satisifies. Ah, the 80's, distilled for your reading pleasure.

Bonfire of the Vanities

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Martha F.

Sonia Grgas

Allison Dempsey

Sara Sunshine

Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy of New York in the last years of the twentieth century, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab it Now. Wolfe's gallery ranges from Wall Street, where people in their thirties feel like small-fry if they're not yet making a million per, to the real streets, where the aim is lower but the itch is just a virulent.

We see this feverish landscape through the eyes of McCoy's wife and his mistress; the young prosecutor for whom the McCoy case would be the answer to a prayer; the ne'er-do-well British journalist who needs such a case to save his career in America; the street-wise Irish lawyer who becomes McCoy's only ally; and Reverend Bacon of Harlem, a master manipulator of public opinion. Above all, we see what happens when the criminal justice system--gorged with "the chow," as the Bronx prosecutor calls the borough's usual black and Latin felons--considers the prospect of being handed a prime cut like Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a novel, but is is based on the same sort of detailed on-scene reporting as Wolfe's great non-fiction bestsellers, The Right Stuff, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And it is every bit as eye-opening in its achievements. It is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis--the kind of fiction strangely absent from our literature in the second half of this century--that reinforces Tom Wolfe's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America.

-jacket flap

The Bonfire of the Vanities A Novel

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