TOM WOLFE

THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

Sarah Christine Gill

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?

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.

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