В Америка е разрешено всичко, което не е забранено.... Дали общественото положение и парите могат да спечелят права?! Дали проблемите на бедните са неглижирани?! Дали чернокожите са невидими?! Том Улф дълбае яростно в живота на обществото и рисува мащабни картини- ярки, тъмни, плашещи. Да, " Кладата на суетата" е мащабен роман, написан сурово и с голям размах. Том Улф се заиграва майсторски не само с обществото, но и с езика. Предвид това, преводът е разкошен и придава още по- голяма положителна тежест върху романа.

Машинации, манипулации, спекулации, безнаказаност, расова дискриминация... Том Улф ни превежда от блясъка на Манхатън и върховете на Уолстрийт до мизерията на Бронкс.

Историята ни показва една измамна свобода. Нито тези, които тънат в охолство са истински свободни, защото целият им живот се върти около това да покриват очаквания; нито тези, които са на ръба на оцеляването си са свободни, защото са оковани във веригите на нищетата.

Един от главните герои е Шърман Маккой- роден под привидно щастлива звезда, наследник на голямо богатство, финансов гуру от Уолстрийт. Звучи добре, нали?! Да, но зад красивото лустро на изобилието, той е затворен зад решетките на брак, в който не се чувства удовлетворен, така както смята, че му се полага. Шърман обаче вярва, че едва ли не всичко му е позволено и има неограничени права. Дали обаче е така в действителност?!
Убеден в това, че той, който осигурява всичко на семейството си, има правото да живее личния си живот както сметне за добре, той се забърква в любовна авантюра, която може да разруши стабилните му основи.
Той се оказва на неправилното място, в неправилното време, и отново, вярвайки в своите неограничени права, бяга от отговорност. Нещо, което може да му коства много. Дали наистина той е Господар на Вселената, за какъвто се смята?! Надали. Да хванеш бика за рогата не е като да хванеш юздите на правосъдието. Животът е като наредени плочки на домино и ако една падне, може да повлече и всички останали... Том Улф рисува изкусно всички причинно- следствени връзки и ни показва цялостна картина и взаимосвързаност.

" Кладата на суетата" е болезнено откровен роман за покварата в човешките сърца. Впечатлена съм от това как Улф засяга толкова щекотливи теми и ги описва с такава лекота.

Unlikeable characters. I had no interest in city politics, tabloid journalism, park avenue or criminal law, an exhausting read with too much detail, too much scenery yet Great book, Great story, great read!
Well written, the heart of the book has a sound purpose, a fun read in spite of itself.

Wolfe did detailed research and drew on his own experiences as hedge fund investor. He wrote the book in serial installments for Rolling Stone and then rewrote it again (two years to rewrite) because he was unhappy with the very public first draft. (Originally Sherman McCoy was a writer not a bond trader)
The epilogue and the judge’s decision at the end sounds just the right note though I didn’t believe
McCoy’s transformation from someone his wife pushes around, his father pushes around, his mistress pushes around to instant junk yard dog.

Added 1/2/11.
While reviewing my GR shelves, I realized that I had read this book quite a while ago, but failed to include in my GR list of books read. I remember enjoying the book. I also remember that, as usual, the movie didn't come up to the book, for me.

January 29, 2012:
As to the meaning of the book title "Bonfire of the Vanities",
GR member, Margaret [ http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/13... ] sent me a message which said the following about the title:
===================================================
"... it comes from the fanatical religious practice, especially in Renaissance Italy, of creating huge public bonfires out of things that were thought to lead Man into Sin - a pretty broad definition that included everything from hand mirrors to books to paintings.

"The biggest and most famous one was staged by the wild-eyed monk Savonarola in 15th century Florence.

"I think Wolfe is drawing a parallel with the shallow, materialistic, pleasure-seeking zeitgeist of wealthy New Yorkers in the 1980s, and putting them in a situation where all that metaphorically goes up in flames.

"Here's a Wikipedia link that's got lots more..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonfire_...
==================================================
Thank you, Margaret!

"I don't care who you are, sometime in your life you're gonna be on the wrong side a the law, and some people got the heart for it and some don't."

Dickens without Dickens, this book with its overkill title  one character gets burnt, a couple of others mildly singed, and there is no Savonarola on sin-inducing luxury goods action either chronicles 1980s New York as Dickens did Victorian London, using the plot as a vehicle to bring the worlds of rich and poor together. In a city we all breath the same air and yet can live in entirely different universes until some grimy minded novelist makes explicit how those worlds intersect. The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of those shock novels of the modern city that periodically need to be rewritten as writers realise that modernity has moved on while the city still remains the site of cultural collisions, social crashes and the battlefield of possibilities that need to be toned down to render them fit for fiction.

Rent controlled living alongside Park Avenue wealthy people who find it too déclassé to use a mortgage to buy their apartments, while the criminal justice system consumes the person caught in its jaws, slowly and thoroughly until they are no more than a professional defendant  and this was how the book was recommended to me, while I was taking a law course, as a way to see how being caught up in the criminal justice system can affect a defendant. The book didn't help me with my exams, but it was fun anyway. Here is the fear of the mugger on the subway, the Masters of the Universe battle it out on Wall Street, while cultures shift like tides through the institutions of the City and the established power structures of the city's government give way to the terrible clamour of the media and those who can manipulate it. However, all the same, if you are in the police then you still get to become a honorary Irishman, reflecting the social construction of the city a hundred years earlier.

On the other hand in its morality this is a thoroughly unDickensian novel although perhaps when it comes to gender relations one might argue that this is a fairly Dickensian novel in that there are virtuous women secure within the bounds of matrimony and then there are the rest, either, and the fingers shudder to type it, unmarried, then still yet more frightful - those who do not respect that sacred union . There is no moral high ground, no feeling of the peculiar horror of poverty and if the foreigners are untrustworthy - so are all the natives. And so the question remains, is it a bonfire of the vanities or appreciative indulgence in their richness and variety?

"'Holy fucking shit!" shouted the Yale men and the Harvard men and the Stanford men. "Ho-lee fucking shit.' How these sons of the great universities, these legatees of Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, Frederick Jackson Turner, William Lyons Phelps, Samuel Flagg Bemis, and the other three name giants of of American Scholarship-how these inheritors of the lux and the veritas now flocked to Wall Street and to the bond-trading room of Pierce and Pierce! How the stories circulated on every campus! If you don't make $250,000 a year within five years, then you were either grossly stupid or lazy...."

After twenty-five years the above quote from The Bonfire of the Vanities rings true. As of 2008, 58% of Harvard male graduates took up careers as high end traffickers in the drug of debt (myself included).

This is a great novel because it not only explores the pathology of money but tacitly calls out universities as way stations on the pilgrim road to enlightened selfishness. But I am not sure if you can even blame the universities. You cannot learn ethics and moral issues in law school/ business school. These are taught in the home at an early age and then applied in kindergarten. Once you taste blood there is no going back. There will always be greed, that is the nature of the beast. Two things rule the world: money and sex. And believe me you never get them both by being ethical.

I disliked all the characters, and this made it difficult for me to really get into this. But, eventually the central plot line was really interesting to me, and I enjoyed the story.

Overall though, not sure I'm interested in reading more Tom Wolfe. The cynicism is just a bit a much for me, though I do appreciate that he doles out his cynicism to all sides.

I also didn't quite get the ending. It seemed to end abruptly, and I'm not really sure what the point was.

The book I am giving 3 stars is a three hundred page novel only about Sherman McCoy, not the 700 page novel as is. I found much of this story to be unnecessary, undeveloped, and ultimately distracting. Kramer, the ADA, is perhaps the next-most-developed person in the story after Sherman, and he is one dimensional, I think. He's into himself. He thinks he's better than his job and his life. And that's all. Dickens could give you that kind of character in one paragraph. I do not know why Wolfe spends so much time on him. He is unsympathetic, and he adds nothing at all to the action. Reverend Bacon could be the other also-ran character. Aside from one rather impressive scene in the man's office, he's like the wizard of Oz but with even less development. He may be a dirty dealer. He may be a true believer. Wolfe does not, to my way of thinking, really even present this conflict in the story.

Beyond finding the characters to be just unsatisfying window-dressing, I found myself distracted by some of the "dialect" I believe the author tried to use throughout. "Piece a shit" rather than "piece of shit" is the major one, I suppose. The bigger distraction was that the author ostentatiously illustrates his "research" throughout. There's much name- and price-dropping in the story, which makes sense for McCoy and his wife, but it also just seemed to be the author showing off. It's as if this is supposed to be some kind of expose. Perhaps it was at the time, and perhaps I just didn't get the freshness that this may have had at the time; in any case, so much of the writing is plagued by awful analogies and needless repetition. There was no subtlety in weaving together the social observations that the author seems to want to make.

I did not not enjoy parts of the book. I almost felt as if this was a brilliant story that became bogged down and was not fully realized when translated into a novel. I know that it has a reputation for speaking from a world that was new, and sexy, at the time, and I agree that I felt like an insider at Pierce & Pierce, an investment firm, by the end. But that's the most rewarding thing about the story. The characters were mostly flat. The writing felt cliched and full of inartful internal references. I do not know if I would read more Wolfe after this, but I might recommend this book because it seems to have been so culturally-resonant.

It was a bizarre experience reading this book. I hated every character in it and wished they'd all die...but I couldn't put it down.

This vicious satire on multiculturalism would never be published by a mainstream publisher today.

The only reasons it was in 1987 were that:

(a) Wolfe was already famous;
(b) Wolfe has a BASED Jewish judge (lol) laying down the law in the penultimate chapter (though the judge's real motive seems to be misanthropic hatred of the mob);
and
(c) It is written so cleverly that many readers will read into it whatever they want…some leftists even interpret it as a satire on ‘white corporate greed’.

Wolfe’s sprawling novel has many themes, some of the more important ones are:

1. White ethnic disloyalty…more accurately, WASP ethnic disloyalty, as Catholic whites like Irish and Italians are shown as having ethnic networks, while the WASP central character loses all his friends as soon as his name is dragged through the mud (this is the true meaning of the Savonarola reference in the book's title).

2. The lying media. One of the chief villains is a British journalist called Fallow (supposedly modelled on Christopher Hitchens), and nearly all journalists in the book are treated as the baying, slavering pack animals they are.

3. The Black-Jewish rift. Jews spearheaded the Black Civil Rights movement of the 60s, and were pissed when certain blacks like Farrakhan turned against them.

4. The degeneracy of big cities like New York.

5. The 80s stock and bond trading bubble, which burst right after this book was published (Oliver Stone’s ‘Wall Street’ came out the same year).

A truly fantastic novel. Highly recommended.

What an amazing book.

Wolfe not only tells a great story but is a master of the English language and his prose is rich with multi-layered metaphors, symbolism, allusions, and I was fascinated by the various references to Edgar Allan Poe.

I was sorry to finish it. I must now watch the movie again if nothing else to highlight how pale a medium is film when compared to literature.

A modern classic.

Tom Wolfe's poke-in-the-eye to the excess and decadence of the 1980's is still hilarious today, aided by the immensely talented voice narrator Joe Barrett.

Bonfire of the Vanities hits you with so many things, it's hard to narrow down what to mention. The main storyline is about Sherman McCoy, a successful Wall Street bond trader who constantly thinks of himself as "Master of the Universe." Naturally, he's married and a philanderer. After he picks up his latest fling from the airport, they get lost in the Bronx and are approached by two black men while the car is stopped. The woman panics and floors the car, hitting one of the men. They don't report it to the police but the incident still makes the news in a big way, causing a racial outcry and stirring up political opportunists - one of whom has a disturbing obsession with brown lipstick.

It's hard to miss Bonfire's relevance to current times, isn't it? But Wolfe's treatment of these characters reminds me of a parent punishing a beloved child: a spanking followed by a hug. He brutally roasts self-interest and skewers annoying traits; the dinner party where Sherman identified each person by their uniquely horrid laugh was hilarious, made even more so by the crazy-good voice actor. Can't say enough about Joe! He's so good I've mentioned him twice now. :)

BotV wasn't as dated as I feared it would be (with the exception of gratuitous ethnicism), and it was much better than I expected. I really only knew the 80's movie was based on a book, and that the movie was awful (I've never seen it.) I think the novel is a little too long, but getting around to it on audiobook made all the difference. Tons of fun.

Blew. Me. Away.

I was lucky enough to spend one year of my life living in Manhattan in the early 1990s. It is a place different to anywhere else and I wondered whether this book (which I read due to its placement on Boxall's 1001 Books to Read list) could possibly capture the bigger-than-life, completely urban, life lived at the speed of light attitude that is NYC. I wondered. I doubted. And I was amazed, because it did.