Customer Reviews

THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

5 star:		(114)
4 star:		(42)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I think that one of the most startling things about this novel is that, for everyone who reads it, there is a different pivotal image, a separate moment in the book which forms an axis for the work. For me, it's Sherman McCoy's phone conversation with his estranged wife, in which he talks about the days when, as he went off to work, he would turn on the street under the window where she was watching, and give the black power sign. It meant, to this white son-of-a-lawyer, that he wasn't going to get sucked into Wall Street, that he was only using it; that it wouldn't change him.

Fast forward a dozen or so years, and Sherman is 38. He's one of New York's leading Bond salesman, a self-titled Master of the Universe who makes a million dollars a year (and that isn't enough), barely sees his wife, and is cheating with another man's gold-digging spouse. As a matter of fact, when we first meet Sherman, the only redeeming feature he has is that he does seem to really love his five-year-old daughter.

Sherman is not the only disgusting character we find as our story opens. There's the mistress, Maria, who laughs at her husband from the confines of her sublet rent-controlled love-nest. The wife is bitchy enough to lose sympathy with the reader despite her husband's philandering. There's the alcoholic tabloid journalist, who is an expert at getting other people to pick up the tab. And there's a thinly veiled reference to the Rev. Al Sharpton, just to complete the picture. When the book opens, the only character with whom the reader can sympathize is Larry, a lawyer who chose to work in the Bronx D.A.'s office because he wants to "make a difference".

And yet, the reader is sucked into the lives of these people. At first it may only be for a tittlating look at how bad bad people can be, but very soon (Wolfe doesn't tease us long) we stay to find out whether our characters will get caught for the crime they have committed; finally, we stay because we have come to admire Sherman McCoy.

It is a testament to Tom Wolfe's abilities that by the end of the novel, we have come to completely different views of most of the characters in this novel. The wife isn't bitchy, she's just dissatisfied with a life that she didn't set out to get. The mistress isn't harmless, she's a viper. The reporter will print any lie to increase the drama of the crime he's uncovering; the lawyer will justify anything to catch his "Great White Defendant".

Sherman begins the book by telling us that he is entitled to his penthouse, his sports car, his mistress, his Saville Row suits. He finishes it standing alone, unable to afford a lawyer and "dressed for jail". But he's standing, and once again, he's raising a fist in the air, determined to overcome.

In *Bonfire of the Vanities*, pop journalist Wolfe takes a sneering satirical look (from a surprisingly European point of view) at American culture and all of its absurdities and obsessions. New York is treated as the microcosm of 80s America with all of its fads, rivalries, economic woes and class inequality mixing together uneasily and then exploding. Sherman McCoy, the supremely irritating central charater, is a fresh-faced adolescent of 38 years who just doesn't get the fact that the world is a harsh, dangerous place--that is until he becomes the fall guy in a politically and racially charged scandal. Peter Fallow (by far the best character in the book)is a delightfully cynical and misanthropic British journalist who observes the parade the do-gooder activists, slick political manipulators, confused cops, thuggish cops, skeletal society ladies, urban punks, garish architecture, trash culture and trendy clubs with an acid wit and always a few stiff drinks under his belt. If they ever make a real movie out of this book (the existing one doesn't count) PLEASE get Jeremy Irons to play Fallow. Some people see this book as some kind of right-wing propaganda. It isn't. Wolfe, despite his own more or less conservative views, allows the story to tell itself without a lot of interpretation from above. Each character is a complex individual with his or her own unique motivations and mixture of vice and virtue. We spend time inside the minds and private lives of a wide variety of people and are allowed to make our own judgements about who deserves what measure of praise or blame. If there is any prejudice in the book it is against people who simplify complex issues. Wolfe's world, like the real thing, is brimming with paradox.

Lot of useful reviews here. No one mentions Wolfe's 24-page introduction, 'Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,' which is excellent in itself as an overview of the alleged death of the novel, The New Journalism, non-fiction v. fiction & his own evolution as a writer. The introduction is worth a read on its own if you're a journalism student, a would-be or actual writer or just interested in the publishing world. As for the rest of the book, it's excellent. Wolfe is a master of the set piece, the extended vignette beautifully observing a situation or person. He is not so good at endings, which is why I picked four stars rather than five. I felt identically about his later "A Man in Full," and it didn't stop me enjoying the heck out of the book. If you enjoy his fiction, his non-fiction is well worth checking out as great examples of very controlled, observant reporting & writing. I particularly enjoyed "From Bauhaus to Our House," an extended essay about modern architecture, and "The Painted Word," ditto on modern art.

Bonfire is my all-time favorite book and, in my opinion, Tom Wolfe is an absolute genius. A lot of talented authors tell us very good, sometimes great, stories, but few people have the genius to cut through all the trappings and see life exactly as it is. Tom Wolfe exposes the excesses of the 80s gloriously in this book. Okay, all the characters were hateful, but how could they have been otherwise? The only problem I found was the ending--I would have liked to have seen a little more resolution, but that doesn't detract from the book's perfection. My only real complaint is that Wolfe never gave us anything else to equal the sheer genius of Bonfire.

It's always fun to read a best seller from almost 20 years ago, especially one that was proclaimed as something of a classic at the time. It's even more enjoyable to discover that Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities proves worthy of its acclaim even with the absence of cell phones, email and instant messaging.

I mention the technology only because such communications dinosaurs as pay phones play significant roles in the story of how an auto accident involving a bond trader and a pedestrian teenager gets complicated by his mistress, a political hack of a DA, the resentful prosecutor, a drunken opportunist of a reporter, society matrons (including the bond trader's wife), a media manipulating black activist/minister, egotistical Wall Street executives, courthouse lawyers and a wealth of other characters.

The title says it all. No character in the book operates without his or her ego getting in the way of things and like a small fire that gets too close to the charcoal lighter and then the gas tank... well, you get the idea.

Forget the nonsensical movie they made of this, as far as I'm concerned that film exists solely for the purpose of demonstrating that Tom Hanks can make a bad decisions once every decade or so. This novel is a delight, one that should be rediscovered by a generation of readers that was in elementary school back in the 80's.

Although several reviewers have claimed that elements of this novel have dated the essence of this novel will always be relevant. True this was written pre-internet, pre-Clinton, pre 9/11 but the vanities that drive the chattering classes, so perfectly satirised by the author, are an inherent characteristic of moneyed urban dwellors anywhere on this planet. The spiralling nature of the plot complements the authors heady character descriptions and set-pieces.

I know several people who have read and hated this novel because of its ultimately bleak portrayal of humanity. I however found it marvellously uplifting (not to mention hilarious) and view the book more as a dark fable on the perils of ambition in a capitalist society. The reader should note that most of the novel's characters would be regarded as successful in their respective professional lives and that each of those characters have lost a little bit of their soul to get where they are. What Wolfe allows us to ponder is : Is this what it takes to get to the top?

Tom Wolfe was once asked if the novel is dead. He replied that it's not quite dead, but it's on life support. He thinks the biggest problem with modern novels is that the novelists don't bother to do adequate research on their subject. How can one write a novel about India, for example, if one has never been to India? In Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe has done the research and has created an exact representation of modern city life in America, complete with politically self-serving DAs, civil rights demagogues, and pompous gold-coast dandies.

Wolfe is obviously a keen observer of detail. This skill combined with his mastery of the reportorial style of writing make for a great novel, and a great expose' of the hustlers and opportunists that use the system for their own self-interest. I think of him as a modern-day Sinclair Lewis, who once said that he never passed judgement one way or another, he just reported what he observed. Since most of us have probably never been in a high-rise apartment on Park Avenue or a housing project in the Bronx, it's interesting to read Wolfe's detailed descriptions down to the type of wallpaper and table centerpieces. All of this works to pull the reader into the scene, the only excess possibly being his proclivity for over-reporting clothing styles. Wolfe shows his love of clothing by using esoteric terms that probably have no meaning to the average reader.

Wolfe's scenes are so realistic the reader can imagine himself being in the action. I felt Sherman's fear in the Bronx jail cell. I felt his shame when lying to his wife about his relationship with Maria. The characters and dialog are so real, even though the reader may not live in that social milieu he can identify with the situation. The action moves at a rapid pace. Wolfe doesn't get bogged down with excessive narrative. He lets the characters speak for themselves--truly the mark of a great novelist.

I love the way Wolfe has the Brits comment on Americans. It's refreshing to see ourselves from another perspective. How funny it is to hear Peter Fallow complain about our "ridiculous country" and our lack of social graces, all the while sponging off of rich Americans at every opportunity.

This book is timeless. I read it for the second time recently and found it as enjoyable as the first. At the end I felt myself wishing for several more chapters. Bonfire of the Vanities should always stand as one of the best examples of American literature by one of our greatest writers.

Tom Wolfe knows how to do his research. In his earlier, nonfiction works, he demonstrates his capacity to observe and synthesize information from even the most chaotic of situations. This is his first work of fiction, and his critical and all-absorbing eye works overtime; no detail is too small, no element is too minute. This work is saturated with timeless authenticity. It is intricate, impressive, and exhaustive.

Exhausting, too.

I admire the virtuosity of this book -- its scope, ambitions, and insights. But these admirable qualities are subsumed by an avalanche of detail. Wolfe amassed a titanic amount of information about New York in the 80's, and instead of carefully parcelling those tid-bits out in a way to delicately suggest the satire he is aiming for, he decided to include every, single, solitary thing he learned. The story here is secondary to the scenery.

Speaking of story: Sherman McCoy, "Master of the Universe," a Park Avenue bond trader with a massive bank account (and an ego and debt to match) is embroiled in a political whirlwind when he and his mistress are the cause of a possibly fatal accident in the Bronx. McCoy's world is knocked out of whack when he finds himself at the mercy of fame-hungry D.A.s, money-hungry opportunists, power-hungry politicians, and gossip-hungry journalists. It's the story of a world full of fools and blow-hards who spend most of their energy trying to be (or at least appear to be) otherwise.

The satire is acute and on-the-nose, but it also centers around a cast composed entirely of unlikeable characters. Everyone from the naive McCoy to the pompous (and shady) Reverend Bacon, from the hypocritical attorney Kramer to the pickled and brined journalist Fallow: they are well-rounded, mostly believable, and mildly intriguing, but they also reek of their various vices. Because of this, when Wolfe attempts poignancy, it comes across as vacuousness. When the satire tries to be tongue-in-cheek, it is instead elbow-in-rib (and not very subtly, either).

The biggest flaw in the novel is that Wolfe has tried to make far too many points, and he takes too long to make them. He puts his two cents in, but it looks like twenty. The story isn't bad at all, and the turns it takes are certainly entertaining, but it is a wearisome read. When all is said and done, I feel like I have learned more about political in-roads, journalistic deception, and financial loopholes than I have about real people, much less those all-greed, all-Me people of the 80's, at which Wolfe's novel tentatively tries to aim.

Again, this is a flaw of Wolfe's refusal to leave even the tiniest microbe of research out of his writing. A good knowledge of characters and setting is necessary to give a novel a solid pulse, a sense of liveliness, but any real and true pulse is usually hidden just beneath the surface. Wolfe has slashed the skin of his story, revealing its pulse in throbbing torrents. If I may torture the metaphor, he's cut a major artery of the tale in order to show us its life, and what he's done instead is cause his novel to die a slow and laborious death. We watch the book struggle and plod forward, valiantly, but by the end, all we're left with is a twitching mass that still wears a grisly death grin. The ending here is less an ending than it is Wolfe running out of research to employ. The pulse stops there.

This is one of the best stories I've ever read. It's intelligent, hysterical, very cynical and yet, so very real. Not only did it capture my attention during its 700pages -to the point I just couldn't go to sleep - but also I actually felt sad once I realized there was no more book to read and that it was over. I had become so attached to the characters - it was almost as if I had become one of their friends - and also I went so into it that I was dragged into its own pace and timing. In the end (don't freak out, I'm not gonna say how it ends) I realized that I 'd become agitated myself as action took place at such a high speed -as if I had been there all the time: if a book is capable of making a person perspire and agitate in his armchair and laugh loudly and histerically, so hard that he is unable to continue reading, then it must be a masterpiece. And this is most certainly one.

Regarded by some as the essential literary representation of 1980s America, "Bonfire of the Vanities" was written during the economic boom and urban crime waves of that decade and published almost as the stock market crashed in 1987. It follows the lives of a group of characters who express New York City's ethnic, socio-economic, and political rivalries through their involvement in a highly-publicized case of hit-and-run. A car belonging to Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue, one of Wall Street's most successful bond brokers, accidentally strikes a young black man in the Bronx. With the injured man in a coma, Harlem preacher, politician, and general rabble-rouser Rev. Reginald Bacon sees an opportunity to advance his agenda -by delivering the racially charged case to ambitious District Attorney Abe Weiss and to unscrupulous tabloid journalist Peter Fallow. Prosecutor Lawrence Kramer jumps at the opportunity to bring down a wealthy WASP in the name of equality. And streetwise Irish lawyer Tommy Killian may be McCoy's only ally in a city where truth and justice take a back seat to just about everything.

"Bonfire of the Vanities"' flaw is ironically the source of its strength. The book is over 600 pages long. It follows too many characters and spends a lot of time describing the world from their point of view. The book's insights rely on its many perspectives, but at the same time, the descriptions are cumbersome. Tom Wolfe generally does not cast his characters in sympathetic light. His willingness to call it how they see it draws the reader into the story out of an almost perverse curiosity. The blunt talk and peek inside the worlds of city politics, tabloid journalism, criminal law, and Park Avenue lifestyles keep us interested. The story is found in the self-serving hostilities and interdependencies of New York's many factions more than it is in the sequence of events. And it's all thoroughly plausible, sadly.