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The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
First Novel -- the fall of a young investment banker
Bantam
December 1988
704 pages
ISBN: 0553275976
Paperback (reprint)
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Contemporary | Fiction
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 as
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 he 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
banded a prime cut like Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue.
The Bonfire of the Vanities is a novel, but it is
based on the same sort of detailed on-scene reporting as
Wolfe's great nonfiction 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.
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