Tom Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in 1987 to widespread critical and popular acclaim. Only days after its release, the dizzying pace and boundless decadence of 1980s Wall Street so enjoyed by the novel’s protagonist, well-born bond trader Sherman McCoy, ground to a halt on Black Monday, the day of the largest one-day decline in recorded stock market history. This was the first of many “resonant” events that led readers to term Bonfire “prophetic.” But to Wolfe, the verisimilitude was of little surprise. Although begun in 1981 and serialized in an earlier form in Rolling Stone in 1984 and 1985, Bonfire was decades in the making, crafted with the keen observational, stylistic, and narrative skills Wolfe had honed in his pioneering practice of New Journalism, a hybrid form of nonfiction that employs novelistic techniques. Wolfe envisioned “a big book about the city of New York,” with the sprawling sociorealism of the Paris chronicled by Balzac and Zola, two of his idols. The result was a best-seller that earned comparisons to Sister Carrie and The Great Gatsby for its willingness to grapple with issues of status, desire, and the American dream in the 20th century.

Wolfe approached these themes first by immersing himself in the subcultures of his diverse cast of characters. His “reporting,” which took him from the bond-trading floor to Bronx jail cells, allowed him to populate Bonfire with characters whose speech patterns, dress, professions, gait, and homes he could meticulously catalogue. Wolfe’s obsession with what he calls “status details,” from a drug dealer’s refusal to be seen in anything but “new-right-out-of-the-box snow-white Reebok sneakers” to the McCoys’ Thomas Hope armchair (“Not a mahogany reproduction but one of the rosewood originals!”), is viewed by some critics as distracting, overblown, and even vacuous. However, these details serve to delineate the myriad layers in a stratified New York City unified only by its drives for consumption and its various but omnipresent vanities. The titular bonfire in which they burn is an allusion to the crusade of Girolamo Savonarola, the Florence priest who ordered followers to throw their costliest ornaments into bonfires set in the public square and who was himself burned at the stake in 1498.

Desire and ambition fuel not only the setting of Bonfire, but also its complex plot and characters. Subcultures first collide when 38-year-old Sherman McCoy, a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe,” takes a wrong turn on the way back to Park Avenue and finds himself, along with his Mercedes roadster and young mistress, in the South Bronx on a barricaded highway ramp. After leaving the car to remove the obstruction, he is approached by two black youths and panics. An altercation ensues, and his mistress, Maria Ruskin, takes the wheel. She collects Sherman and speeds away, but not before hitting one of the two boys with a thok that haunts Sherman for weeks to come. Not eager to make his adultery a matter of public record, Sherman agrees with Maria, who is also married, not to go to the police.

The hit-and-run, reminiscent of The Great Gatsby, sets the wheels of justice in realistically slow motion, a process that is propelled by a variety of interested parties, including a dipsomaniac British tabloid journalist, a frustrated Bronx assistant district attorney who resents the salaries of his corporate-employed former classmates, and a smooth-talking black political leader. All are eager to use the emerging story of a black youth, appropriately named Henry Lamb, slain by a white Upper East Sider to advance their own careers and ambitions. The question of what crime was committed and whether Sherman is in fact to blame quickly becomes irrelevant in the pursuit of headlines, soundbites, and a “Great White Defendant” in the fortress-like Bronx courthouse.

The opening chapters provide the reader entry into distinct worlds that are separated by more than zip codes and tax brackets. The lives of Sherman, assistant D.A. Larry Kramer, and reporter Peter Fallow are glimpsed through their eyes and the conditions in which they work, live, and try to love. Despite their differences, all are afflicted by what Wolfe has referred to as “money fever.” Finances are a constant source of angst, as much for penniless Peter as for Sherman, whose mind is filled with calculations of how he will make ends meet on $1 million a year.

As Bonfire moves between “boldfaced parties” attended by emaciated charity-circuit women dubbed “social x-rays” and lunch-hour chats at the Bronx criminal courthouse, the reader comes to understand status as more than the province of the wealthy; each individual is jockeying for status, just within different groups. The 1990 film version of Bonfire, directed by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Hanks, was a box office disaster, in part because it sought to tell the multifaceted story from a single point of view—that of journalist Peter (Americanized and played by Bruce Willis)—rather than through the worlds of New Yorkers of various classes on the occasion of a rare intersection.

For all its urban sprawl, women are notably peripheral in Bonfire, which makes the panoramic view that Wolfe seeks ultimately incomplete. Nicholas Lemann views the women characters as universally underdeveloped and existing mainly as “foils for male preening.” Similarly, Wolfe’s ability to situate his characters so firmly within their subcultures, with what critic Frank Conroy calls “malicious glee,” leaves the reader with little sympathy for anyone. With no one to root for, the reader is swept up by the novel’s swift comic logic and left dazzled, perhaps satisfied, but in the end, curiously empty.

Finally, in the critical haste to engage with the grand scale of the 659-page novel, Wolfe’s preoccupation in his nonfiction with what Chris Anderson called “the rhetorical problem of trying to communicate [an] experience” has gone unnoticed in Bonfire. The refrain of “How to tell them?” “How to tell it?” from Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a chronicle of the drug culture of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, is reprised as Sherman struggles with how to explain the events behind his imminent arrest to his boss, parents, wife, and daughter. Wolfe seems to have struggled similarly with how to tell the reader how his story ends and closes the novel with an epilogue in the form of a New York Times article that neatly tallies how the individuals concerned have emerged from this particular chain of events. Perhaps not surprisingly, given Bonfire’s author, it is Peter, the journalist, who comes out on top.

SOURCES
Anderson, Chris. “Pushing the Outside of the Envelope.” In Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction, 8–47. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001.
Conroy, Frank. Review of Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, New York Times Book Review, 1 November 1987, p. 46.
Lemann, Nicholas. “New York in the Eighties,” Atlantic Monthly 260, no. 6 (December 1997): 104, 106–107.
McKeen, William. Tom Wolfe. New York: Twayne, 1995.
Scura, Dorothy, ed. Conversations with Tom Wolfe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
Wolfe, Tom. Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: Analysis of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, Criticism of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, Essays of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, Plot of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, Summary of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, Themes of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities