“[H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight. Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening – and he was among the victors! He lived on Park Avenue, the street of dreams! He worked on Wall Street, fifty floors up…! He was at the wheel of a $48,000 roadster with one of the most beautiful women in New York…beside him!”
-tTom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

This is one hell of a book. Excuse me, I forgot the exclamation point. This is one hell of a book!

When the Eastern Nebraska Men’s Bibliophile & Social Club (a.k.a. my book club) picked The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it was about and, ultimately, how it’d make me feel. New York! The 80s! Wall Street and Wall Street; big hair and bigger cell phones; Masters of the Universe and “Greed is Good”. That’s what I expected. Frankly, it did not intrigue me all that much.

Well, The Bonfire of the Vanities is all those things. But it is also much, much more.

This is a big social satire on wealth, class, and race. It is a legal drama. It is – at times – a character study. It is a snapshot of a pre-Giuliani New York City, a New York City not that far removed from The Warriors. Parts of this novel are blackly funny, but a real strain of sadness - bordering on melancholy - runs through it as well. This is 659 hardcover pages written at an exhilarating, exhausting pace, in Wolfe’s trademark style that relies on repetitious phrasing, homophonic speech, internal monologues, plenty of ellipses, and more exclamation points than one cares to count.

The story at the center of this swirling storm is rather simple, and rather relevant. Sherman McCoy is a wealthy white bond trader making close to a million per. He has an attractive, interior designer wife, a young child that he loves, and a mistress that he tells himself he deserves. One fateful night, while driving his mistress back from the airport in his Mercedes, he takes a wrong turn and ends up in the Bronx. There is an incident – one that leaves a young black man in a coma, a community baying for blood, a DA looking for votes, and an ambitious prosecutor looking to impress a girl.

That ambitious prosecutor is Larry Kramer, a Columbia Law School grad who lives in a tiny apartment, takes the subway to work, and wonders where it all went wrong, how his classmates all ended up in white shoe law firms while he shuffles to a Bronx courthouse.

There is a Dickensian sweep to The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe overstuffs his plot with colorfully-named and memorable supporting characters, from Reverend Bacon, a Harlem activist (and seeming Al Sharpton stand-in), to Thomas Killian, a tough Irish lawyer who has forgotten more criminal law than all the fancy firms know combined. Despite the lengthy list of characters (all of whom make impressions), Wolfe focuses on three: McCoy, Kramer, and Peter Fallows, a drunk Brit journalist looking for a sensational story to save his career (and always, in a running gag, looking for someone to buy him dinner and wine). We only get inside these three men, meaning that despite Wolfe’s attempt to give us a broad swath of society, we only see out the eyes of upper and middle class white males. In a book that felt quite modern, the restriction of viewpoints felt like a throwback.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is probably most remembered for its sly dissection of New York City’s upper crust. That tends to undersell Wolfe’s achievement. His reportorial effort is this novel’s real success. There is, for instance, a bleakly hilarious dinner party that feels wildly surreal, but is so acutely observed that you’re left believing Wolfe probably experienced something just like it. And he isn’t just focused on Park Ave. There is a wonderful scene set at the courthouse where the prosecutor Kramer is musing on “the Chow,” the bus loads full of black and Hispanic criminals that are daily fed into the criminal justice system. Wolfe’s forensic probing of American criminal law is magnificent, and reads like something penned by famed street chronicler David Simon. He takes you on an acutely detailed journey through the booking process that is savage, funny, and tense.

One of the wonders of The Bonfire of the Vanities is its tonal shifts. It elicits chuckles one moment, chills the next. At some points it is intimate and subtle; at other points, it is broad to the point of a lampoon. Take, for example, two separate scenes centered on Sherman McCoy. In the first, he has an internal dialogue about not being able to survive on a million a year:

The appalling figures came popping into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had taken out to buy the apartment. What was $21,000 a month to someone making a million a year? That was the way he had thought of it at the time – and in fact, it was merely a crushing, grinding burden - that was all! It came to $252,000 a year, none of it deductible, because it was a personal loan, not a mortgage…So, considering the taxes, it required $420,000 in income to pay the $252,000. Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,000 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fees; $116,000 for the house on Old Drover’s Mooring Lane in Southampton ($84,000 for mortgage payment and interest, $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance, and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes). Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000…The Taliaferro School, including the bus service, cost $9,400 for the year. The tab for furniture and clothes had come to about $65,000; and there was little hope of reducing that, since Judy was, after all, a decorator and had to keep things up to par. The servants…came to $62,000 a year. That left only $226,000, or $18,850 a month, for additional taxes and this and that, including insurance payments (nearly a thousand a month, if averaged out), garage rent for two cars ($840 a month), household food ($1,500 a month), club dues (about $250 a month) – the abysmal truth was that he spent more than $980,000 last year.

This passage is supposed to make us sneer at Sherman McCoy and his absurd 1%-er problems. And we do. There are several scenes pointing out the ridiculousness of Sherman’s life; how his career as a bond trader adds nothing to the world.

But Wolfe is not content with hammering this single dimension of Sherman’s character. Later, in a much different scene, we come along with Sherman as he visits his aging father to tell him that he is in trouble. His father, a once-successful lawyer Sherman refers to as “the Lion”, wants to help. But time has passed his father, and Sherman recognizes that all his dad’s old boy connections, his once-vaunted reputation, none of it matters.

[I]n that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is studded with poignancies along with the social criticism. It makes for a much richer literary experience, and one that grounds the more ridiculous elements (such as a man dying at a fancy restaurant, and the maître d’ forcing the police to take the body out a bathroom window) in an elemental truth.

This is by no means a perfect book. As I mentioned above, it is short on developing black and female characters. The end is also far too farcical for my taste. There are a lot of storylines that end rather abruptly, or are never resolved at all.

The imperfections pale in comparison to the accomplishment. A panorama of an American city at a very specific time that nevertheless feels utterly timeless.

Wow. I started off feeling very lukewarm about this one, mostly because I couldn't get over my distaste for some of the characters. But about 100 pages in I started to feel confused about whom I actually felt sympathetic toward (the only truly good character never gets to speak). 200 pages in, I couldn't stop reading anymore. This book is hilarious in a bitter and infuriating way. It's a study of how people will use each other and not even notice how they are routinely used by other people until they're of no use to anyone.

The book explores racial and class tensions in New York City in the 80's, but from a distinctly white male point of view (there are plenty of female and black characters; Wolfe just doesn't get into their heads). That's the premise, though... we see New York from the perspective of all these white men, in different places in the NYC food chain, who all see themselves as Masters of the Universe for various petty reasons. The question is whether the biggest Master of them all will end up questioning his role in the social order after he gets caught up in the political and criminal machine of the Bronx.

This book made a much deeper impression on me than I expected it to. At the very least, I will never look at jury duty in the same way again.
So, the plot in a nutshell: Sherman McCoy, a wealthy investment banker (white, obviously), is driving his mistress home from the airport one night when they take a wrong turn and end up in the Bronx. This ends with them hitting a nineteen-year-old black boy and then driving away. The story follows McCoy trying to cover up the accident while the Bronx detectives and prosecutors try to figure out what happened, and the ensuing trial and its effects on the lives of everyone involved.
The book was really engrossing, and I especially liked it for two reasons: the first is Tom Wolfe's obvious and flattering admiration of the Irish (woot!) - or at least, the fact that every single Irish character in the book is regularly described as a total BAMF. Case in point: "Irish bravery was not the bravery of the lion but the bravery of the donkey. As a cop, or as an assistant district attorney in Homicide, no matter what kind of stupid fix you got yourself into, you never backed off. You held your ground. That was what was scary about even the smallest and most insignificant of the breed. Once they took a position, they were ready to fight. To deal with them you had to be ready to fight also, and not many people on this poor globe were willing to fight...No, thought Kramer, they don't need alcohol. They're high on what tough, undeluded motherfuckers they are."
I don't know if Tom Wolfe is Irish, but if he isn't he definitely wants to be.
The second thing I loved about the story was Judge Kovitsky, who makes Judge Judy look like a no-talent milquetoast. Here's his idea of counseling a nineteen-year-old kid who's been brought to court for being an accessory to armed robbery: "'See?' said Kovistsky. 'You've got a job, you've got a home, you're young, you're a nice-looking, bright young man. You've got a lot going for you. You've got more than most people. But you've got one big problem to overcome. YOU BEEN INVOLVED IN ALL THESE FUCKING ROBBERIES!'"
He's also fond of screaming at unruly courtroom spectators to "SHUDDUP!" and I adored him for it.

When I am asked what my favorite book ever is, this is one that immediately springs to mind. Wolfe's writing is some of the best of the 20th Century, and this story of investment bankers, homeless people and the collusion between rich and poor is the best explanation of the 80's, and manages to be a story that explains more about an era than any history of the time ever could. Wolfe has moved from recreating how non-fiction was written to a brilliant novelist.

I had a friend who said that in the future when people point to a movie and say, "That's what the '80s were like, they'll point to Oliver Stone's "Wall Street." That's what I think about this book.

A bonds trader hits and kills a guy in a scary neighborhood and then runs scared. What's more '80s than that? It's got greed, excess, and Bernard Goetz all rolled into one.

I actually got to hear Tom Wolfe talk about this book while I was in college in the mid-'80s. He wrote it as a serial in Rolling Stone and when he got to the part where the lead character kills his victim, Wolfe initially was going to have it happen in a subway the same way Goetz killed his attacker/victim. Wolfe said he had to change his story because he didn't think anyone would believe he'd made his up after the Goetz shooting. Brilliant.

Funnily enough, all of my friends who have read this liked it. But a lot of goodreads reviewers do no. I suspect, in fact, that this book will move in and out of fashion for decades to come, simply because satire always moves in and out of fashion. I imagine that many people reading this in the nineties, for instance, or people whose outlook on life was definitively shaped by the nineties, will find it a repugnant, politically incorrect travesty of all that is right with the world. In short, they are incapable of reading satire.

If you are capable of reading satire, then this is for you. Is it overlong? Yes. Is the use of exclamation points irritating in the extreme, sometimes resembling bad adolescent poetry? Yes (but that might also be an accurate rendering of the people who are thinking those exclamation points). Does it take an awfully long time to get going? Yes. But the last two thirds so perfectly skewer everyone - from the hideous quasi-aristocratic socialites through the earnest and easily corruptible lawyers to the rabble-rousing radical-turned-self-interested-shitheads - that I can forgive the infelicities.

Also, this must be pretty close to the best title in the history of English language literature. A quick scan of my shelves doesn't yield anything close.

This probably deserves a full five stars, but I just feel it could - and should - have been sixty or seventy pages shorter. Brilliant, though.

When I think of all the books I've ever read, those that stand out, that resonated enough to be remembered as having a special voice, or delivering a potent punch, deserve 5 stars. This was one of those. If I read it today, I might be more critical, but it fascinated me back then. When I've thought of a particular blindness of the rich, that sense of security in a turbulent and desperate world, the Masters of the Universe, I think of Tom Wolfe's novel.

uno de los mejores libros de la década de los 90 del siglo pasado. Realmente genial.

I am going to say that this is the best novel in American literature and if you disagree then not only are you off my X-Mass card list but I may have to beat you up, just a little bit. If you can find it, read Tom Wolfe's introduction that he wrote for one of the latter printings. He does a brilliant job of explaing what he was after with this book, a novel about the greatest city in the world circa 1980. It is also one of the best essays on the novel that I have ever read.

And do not, I repeat, do NOT watch the movie. I’ve never even seen the movie but I know that it is a steaming pile of yak dung just by the casting choices they made (and I read a review or two).

Originally serialized in Rolling Stone Magazine back in the mid 1980s, much like the old days of the novels of Dickens and Dumas, the actual novel came out and was a monster bestseller for a long, long time. I doubt this novel is taught in a single university literature class as academics shunned it because it wasn’t “psychological” enough for them.

Wolfe chose to write about an enormous swath of late 20th century American society, and for this he was criticized by douche bags at universities who preferred the micro-fictions of John Updike, Saul Below, Phillip Roth, Cheever, Oates, and the other academic writers who never seemed to leave their university offices. People are always saying that we need to write about what we know. The problem is that most writers don’t know anything. Infidelity among university professors they know about, but to learn about the world we live in you need to get out and be a journalist, like Zola. Wolfe was a journalist first, so he understood the need to step outside.

Instead of relying on your precious (and land-locked) imagination, get off your lazy butt and look around at the world outside of your little bubble.

Every chapter can be read like a short story, and what brilliant short stories they all are.

It's almost quaint the ideas we had about wealthy people, back then at the beginning of the Reagan tax cuts for the rich. Today Sherman McCoy would be upper middle class, at best.

Park Avenue...Wall Street...Wealth...Power...
A Beautiful Mistress...Social Status...
A Master of the Universe, he had it all.

If you are not your possessions, profession, or social status, what are you? After it all comes tumbling down, that is the question Sherman McCoy is forced to answer.

“He lived on Park Avenue, the street of dreams! He worked on Wall Street, fifty floors up, for the legendary Pierce & Pierce, overlooking the world! He was at the wheel of a $ 48,000 roadster with one of the most beautiful women...”

I have to say I don't think I have ever read a novel with such an accurate view of the world. With the exception of little details that dated the novel, I felt like I was seeing (reading?) a snapshot of New York today. Not that it doesn't apply to the rest of the country. If you look at Wolfe's portrayal of the media, the authorities, and race relations and then take a look at your community, you'll see the similarities.
As I was taking a quick break from Trollope, it was refreshing to see a novel where characters are neither wholly good nor wholly bad. It's hard to even pass judgement on Sherman by the end. (Although interestingly, the reason I even picked this up is because I kept reading articles that equated the amoral Sherman McCoy with the Wall Street crowd that apparently single-handedly brought the economy crashing down on us. Apparently they over-simplified their reading of the novel in the same way they over-simplified their analysis of the financial crisis.)