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The Bonfire of the Vanities
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Powerful, Cynical Tale
Tom Wolfe captures the essence of big-city racial and class conflict, plus greed, ambition, and self-serving hypocrites. His story concerns high-living banker Sherman McCoy, whose accidental exit from the New York freeway into the crime-plagued South Bronx leads to his mistress running over a young black man (who may have been looking to rob McCoy). Enter a questionable black leader, an unscrupulous vote-seeking district attorney, and a sleazy tabloid reporter, each of whom seeks to manipulate and play off events for their own aggrandizement. The story has few admirable characters at any level, not in the Park Avenue mansions, the courts, nor the tough streets. Equally lacking are social codes of decency and honesty. The story covers New York in the mid-1980's but one senses it applies today as well.
Wolfe provides a powerful tale, one with some parallels to the Tawana Brawley hoax that occurred not long after this book arrived. The book drags a bit in a couple places (thus four stars and not five), but Wolfe provides a powerful message.
Rating:  - The Best Mainstream Novel of the Last Two Decades
On the plus side, The Bonfire of the Vanities compares well with Balzac's stuff. I mean, the methods are similar. The story follows several very different characters living in New York, and each scene is detailed, particularized, analyzed, painted with a very fine brush. Many layers of New York's society are represented. There are no moral messages, no lessons to be learned, just life in New York in the late 'Eighties or early 'Nineties at its most intense, presented as "business as usual," with corrupt politicians, lascivious prosecutors, moronic members of the jury, conceited stock market honchos, cynical lawyers, less-than-bright policemen, political opportunists, socialites, priests, opera singers, real estate agents with five thousand dollar manicures, rich faithful wives who deserve to be strangled, only it never occurs to anyone to strangle them, mistresses on the make, petty criminals, silly immigrants, bone-headed journalists, feminists of both genders, racial and ethnic tension - and on and on. The book is really a lot of fun.
On the other hand, the opus falls just short of making its author, well, "the Balzac of our time." No scene is picturesque enough to be called cinematographic, and for a novel 800 pages long that's a bit, well, loquacious (on the author's part). The author tends to explain too much, and fits people and scenes together in such a way as to promote his own outlook, leaving the attentive reader no choice but to examine it. Upon closer examination, one realizes that Mr. Wolfe's main purpose is to show that people in general are vile, selfish, obtuse creatures (without exception); that life is a pretty ridiculous affair; and that any joy a person ever derives from living is brief, accidental, and usually comes at the expense of others. To put it plainly, THERE IS NO GOD in this novel. It was written by a fierce atheist. There is neither faith, hope, nor love in it. None. Life is algebraically plain and tedious.
(I realize I said earlier there were no moral messages in the book. There aren't any. The above is an OUTLOOK, not a message).
Literature thrives on extraordinary situations in which characters are inspired to perform extraordinary acts. The element of surprise in Wolfe's novel is purely circumstantial. Folks have no fre will in this story. (All atheists are determinists more or less by definition, I suppose).
In the past, I've had some interesting experiences related to the publication of this novel. Two years after it came out (in the early 'Nineties, I believe), the news finally reached the Philistines, and by Philistines I mean those representatives of the middle class (and, sometimes, the upper middle class; I have nothing to say about the actual upper class since no one, not even the representatives of the said class themselves, can figure out what the hell they're up to, what it is they do all day, and what their problem is) ... uh ... where was I? ... Philistines ... those representatives of the middle class that once in a while make a half-hearted effort to appear CULTURED, which, in their view, means catching a program on the History Channel once in a while and telling others that they're reading "this book, it's actually pretty good." They never seem to finish this book. I mean, they sort of struggle through the first twenty pages, and then skim through the rest, and make plans to read it properly when they visit Aruba next year, or some such. They're always too busy, they never have any "free time." One gets the impression that if they stopped being busy for a moment, civilization would just collapse and never recover. Anyway, this dude had a copy of "Bonfire" in his briefcase and was telling me (his colleague) how everybody had recommended this book to him. He was going to read it when he had some free time. He actually DID take it to Aruba (there was also a wife involved, I believe). He came back, I believe, without having finished it. A year later he died. He was a good guy, too. Reading just wasn't "his thing," as Philistines like to say.
Anyway, when "Bonfire" came out, the hype was considerable, which for me is nearly always a turn-off. And then the movie came out (which, incidentally, was far more politically incorrect than the book, and the choice of actors and actresses was just UNBELIEVABLE; I loved it). So I put off reading "Bonfire" until, oh, I don't know, maybe after 9/11. By that time, home video games had become astonishingly popular, and crime rates started dropping everywhere across the nation, including New York (for which then-Mayor Giuliani took all the credit, of course). When I finally got to read it, the novel struck me as a bit dated. Not that any issues described in it with a flourish, social and otherwise, had become a thing of the past. The overall societal set of problems had shifted a little since the novel's publication, that's all.
The story is constantly balancing on the edge of political correctness, even though it never goes beyond the boundaries, not once. Even so, few other authors would dare show a book that probes so many "untouchable," "sacred-cow" issues to an editor, and few editors would touch a book of this sort with a hundred-foot pole. The advantage of being Tom Wolfe, I suppose, is that during the decades he spent being a journalist and creating his own style (starting back in the '60's), the man gradually accustomed everyone to the fact that he says outrageous things and gets away with it. The degree of outrage has increased over the years, and today Mr. Wolfe can get away (I would imagine) with saying pretty much anything, because he knows that no one will take it (or him) seriously.
It is worth remembering, while reading this novel, that its author belongs to the glorious school of Southern authors with New York careers: the crux of American literature. God bless.
Rating: - 5 stars as a period-piece
Tom Wolfe excels at culture, or at least he certainly used to, pulling together the genuine thoughts and actions of various subsets of people and so capturing the essential creature of a movement.
In this, Bonfire never disappoints. He shows us glitzy and amoral Wall Street moneymakers, portraits of an imploding criminal justice system, variously-motivated community 'opinion leaders', and more. All of this takes ages to set up, pushing the essential action back a few hundred pages as the forces-that-be dance. Nonetheless, Wolfe performs his monkey-trick, still new at this stage in his career: all of these cultural -elements-as-characters collide at once.
Because Wolfe is so talented at culture-writing, the story comes off brilliantly. And yet, it *is* culture-writing. If you aren't willing to read deeply into each of these culture characters, you will despise the immense exposition afforded them. Wolfe remains interested largely in the culture side, and his characters are more cultural stand-ins than timeless personages.
Bonfire of the Vanities is a terrific vision of New York in the bond trader's heyday, which few describe more vividly than Wolfe. But perhaps it is not a whole lot else.
Rating: - Wolfe "Bonefire" - One For The Ages
I do not think an author puts more into his books than Wolfe. This is a story so much more than about the greedy 80's. As you are reading you are saying to yourself exactly what Wolfe saids seconds later, as if he is in your mind. Its about political correctness gone awry. And its so "New York City" and you have to live and work there to totally see how Wolfe is so accurate even 20 years later.
Sadly now as you read this great novel, you think to the disaster of a movie. So altered and so miscast. And reading about the making of the movie, the same fictional pressures of politically correctness in the book hampered the actual movie. For example Morgan Freeman's a great actor but his character is totally different than the book. This is a movie that SHOULD BE RE-MADE.
In any event The Bonefire of the Vanities is a MUST read.
Rating: - Bonfired Up
In all 31 flavors of "Law and Order on TV, the NYPD and DA's office disposes of a case from the incident to the trial in an hour--sometimes two if it's a two-part episode. In "Bonfire of the Vanities" Tom Wolfe does the same thing in about 700 pages. That's because Wolfe brings to bear all the complexities of trying a case in the real world.
In the mid-1980s, Sherman McCoy is a bond salesman at Pierce & Pierce, a self-described "Master of the Universe" with a three million-dollar apartment on Park Avenue, a wife who spends thousands on decorating it, a six-year-old daughter who attends a pricey private school, and a mistress named Maria Ruskin, who herself is wealthy from marrying a much-older man. One night Sherman goes to pick Maria up at the airport and their Mercedes Benz becomes lost on the seedy streets of the Bronx. They're approached by two black kids, and from there the "Master of the Universe" becomes an unwitting pawn of a black "reverend" hungry for publicity, a drunken British reporter hungry for a story, and a Bronx DA hungry for re-election. Because in the real world, cases aren't solved in an hour and "justice" is a game won or lost based on who can cheat the most and get away with it.
Like an ancient Greek tragedy, McCoy has to pay for his hubris. So do some of the other characters, although others are seemingly rewarded for their bad behavior. This is certainly not a novel of white hats and black hats where the good guys triumph and the bad guys get their just reward. If you want that, you'd better stick to the TV.
What Wolfe does so well with this book is to paint the "big picture" of New York City in the 1980s with its melting pot of Irish, Italians, Jews, blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Wasps. All of these rival factions collide with the McCoy case to depict not just the justice system, but society as a whole. It's an unflattering image to say the least, even viewed through the prism of satire. More importantly, the image of black against white and rich against poor is still applicable today in America's major cities. That makes Wolfe's book as relevant today as it was back in the `80s.
Wolfe's writing itself can get a little tedious and long-winded at times. There are so many nuances and complexities and tangents going on throughout the book. While these provide richness and depth, at some point it becomes overkill. The stuff about the mayor and the Episcopal Church was interesting, but not really necessary. As well there are...so many ellipses...and exclamation points! It can be a little irritating after 700 pages.
Still, it's a relatively minor flaw in what is a great book that even at 700 pages shouldn't take too long to read because it's so funny and clever that it's hard to put down. I had previously read Wolfe's "Man in Full" that came out ten years after "Bonfire of the Vanities" and has many of the similar themes of race, class, and a rich man in legal peril, though it takes place in Atlanta instead of New York. I'd recommend that book as well.
As for the 1990 movie of "Bonfire of the Vanities" it pretty much makes every critic's worst list, so I wouldn't recommend that. The movie does stick to at least most of the book's main points. In its defense, it would be impossible to depict all the subtleties and nuances of Wolfe's novel on the big screen. Trying to adapt it really was an impossible mission.
That is all...
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