The Bonfire Of The Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
Nominations: National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1987, NY Times Finalist 1987
Date Read: April 14, 2021
Wolfe’s satire of the excess of the late 80’s in New York centers around Sherman McCoy, a self-professed Master Of The Universe. On the surface, he has it all – the high-paying career, a penthouse apartment in Manhattan and a weekend house on Long Island, and a beautiful wife, daughter and mistress. Yet even as the reader walks through the halls of his life, before everything goes to hell, you can’t help but hear the echo. Sherman’s life is long on appearances but short on substance.
For all the power and prestige flowing through Sherman’s life, Wolfe highlights just how precarious and unstable those pillars are. With the right set of circumstances and with the people around you succumbing to their base instincts, the mighty can be toppled with the shift of a gear. In this case, shifting into reverse on an onramp in the Bronx.
Wolfe is a master at describing the absurd. Two scenes that stand our particularly through this 685 page tome is, first, the excessive humiliation and overdone brilliance of the booking process for Sherman– the packing peanuts stuck to his pants, completely soaked from waiting in a downpour, his pants and shoes falling off because they confiscated his belt and shoelaces, having to walk bent over in half to clear the metal detector.
The second was the demise of Arthur Ruskin, Maria’s husband, at lunch with Peter Fallow. Ruskin goes from another Master Of The Universe type one minute to an inconvenience carcass the next. His shirt untucked, a grimace permanently affixed to his face and forced out the window of the restaurant’s lady’s room. Wolfe, in these types of scenarios, displays absolute genius.
Of course, the lasting impression I will take from this novel is the disparity in the black and white experience in the judicial system. While I know Wolfe was intentionally trying to highlight this, no satire was needed to actually drive home the point. In real life, the trial of Derek Chauvin, the officer accused of killing George Floyd, is wrapping up and the country is reeling from the murder of Daunte Wright, another black man killed at the hands of law enforcement.
For a novel written in the late 80’s, 34 years ago, it would be a celebration to say that black justice has improved by leaps and bounds but that is simply not the case.
I had a lot of compassion for the way in which Sherman’s life was essentially ruined by the mistake of that fateful night in the Bronx but this is too often an occurrence for non-whites thrown into the meat grinder of the justice system. I’m fed up and disgusted at the whole damn thing.
Looking Forward: A Man In Full
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