The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]
I will admit that before I read The Bonfire of the Vanities I only knew two things about it: that it was made into a movie that no one walking this earth seemed to truly enjoy, and that the story involved Wall Street traders and trading. That’s really about it. Needless to say I didn’t have very high expectations when I decided to pick up this book when I was suddenly seized by the desire to read a well-known ’80′s book that was not written by Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney. The book does include a Wall Street trader (in so much as one of the main characters, Sherman McCoy, is a trader) and trading, but that facet of it, especially when it comes to any details about Wall Street and the company that McCoy works for, comprises only a small percentage of the book. As for the movie, I still have not seen it and have no desire to do so. But as far as the book goes, it is deserving of some praise. This is a very good novel, a very good window into the NYC of the ’80′s, and an all-around fun read by Mr. Wolfe. And by fun I mean fun in like a paint-by-numbers kind of way. I’ll expand on this later.
What I don’t want you to think is that book consists of actual fun, because it does not. It has its moments of humor for sure but the center of The Bonfire of the Vanities revolves around racial tension, class wars, wealth, and the ease in which the poor can manipulated into being pawns for the media and for the neighborhood organizations who are trying to keep up in the political games of the city. With regards to the last point I found myself thinking at times that Wolfe had done a wonderful job of re-examining the same things that Ellison was interested with Invisible Man and Dostoevsky with The Possessed (but with Wolfe giving it an ’80′s, macro application of makeup to it instead of the literary and more serious lens that the aforementioned books use).
The Bonfire of the Vanities centers around Sherman McCoy missing the interstate exit back into Manhattan after he picks up his mistress, Maria Ruskin, from the airport. The two find themselves lost in the Bronx (in McCoy’s new luxury coupe) and wind up near an exit ramp that will take them back on to the interstate, but the ramp has been blocked by some garbage cans and tires. Two black males approach the car and Sherman and Maria assume that they are going to attack them and, through a series of events that are first described in the novel from Sherman and Maria’s POV and then from the people on the street’s POV, Maria takes control of the car and backs into one of the black males and he winds up going into a coma at a nearby hospital (the same hospital that released him the night of the accident after only looking at his wrist).
From here, the novel takes some predictable turns (young black male put in coma by rich white people and their rich white people automobile becomes a sensationalistic story and cause célèbre; caricatures are created in the media and in the streets pitting Park Avenue against The Ghetto) and introduces some predictable characters (McCoy, the clueless rich guy who can’t possibly understand why a crowd of angry black people are yelling in front of his Park Avenue apartment; the District Attorney who is so idealistic it’s almost sickening). But Wolfe takes these (and other) predictable elements and still churns out a really well-written and engaging book. Almost every passage involving Reverend Bacon, the black minister whose hands are in many of the community groups in the Bronx, is superb—especially the conversation he has with a lawyer in which he talks about the house that they are sitting in. The way that Peter Fallow, the drunken Brit who works at a tabloid and is chosen to be the first to write about the black kid in the coma, is written and the whole British vs. American angle that seems to consume the back of his head came across as believable and nicely fleshed out. (In the epilogue of the novel, we learn that Fallow won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the McCoy case and he’s basically living the American Dream, no doubt muttering his disdain for the whole charade to himself and being more vocal about it amongst his ex-pat friends while dining in expensive, Brit-frequented restaurants.)
The Bonfire of the Vanities is a novel that I would definitely recommend for anyone who has a diverse reading palette; someone who will see Wolfe’s tics (his overuse of ellipses and exclamation marks in the beginning) and embrace some of its flaws (it does a feel a little dated but still strong, like a first season episode of Law & Order) with care and forgiveness.
Which brings me back to my paint-by-numbers remark at the beginning of this review.
What I mean by that remark is that a paint-by-numbers piece is fun because you know what it’s going to look like in the end. The flip side to a paint-by-number piece is that it’s not always fun to do (because you know what it’s going to look like). When you read this novel you know that Sherman McCoy is going to get nailed; you know that Maria is going to sell him out; you know that the D.A.’s office is going to play dirty; you know that McCoy’s lawyer are going to play dirty; you know that the racial stuff will be a little maddening (Wolfe does an outstanding job of hitting the right notes when writing about both sides of the fight for the boy in the coma). The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 690 page novel, a somewhat demanding paint-by-numbers piece.
There are many aspects of this novel that I genuinely enjoyed. The fact that it is a nearly 700 page novel that, to me, read like a 300 page novel is a feat not easily accomplished and one that I have to tip my hat to. I really enjoyed this novel and would recommend it to anyone who is not scared by books that exceed the 500 page barrier, or to anyone who is in the mood to revisit the ’80′s.
