The Bonfire of the Vanities: A Novel by Tom Wolfe (PDF)

Description

Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. “No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton” (The National Review) “A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy.” (The New Republic) Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe’s first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. Wolfe’s novel is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis that reinforces the author’s reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Ayyyyy! Whaddaya whaddaya! It don’t get no betta dan dis! My word! How Tom Wolfe breathes LIFE into his immaculately crafted characters! How they grow! Or utterly disintegrate into foul parodies of their former selves. McCoy? He’ll be fine! He grew man; he grew. Truly a Morality Take for the Ages! Damn fine stuff, yo!

⭐On happily rereading it after many years, it’s a fantastic tour of the stereotypes of the 1980s through the wonderfully interesting view of the author.

⭐I read and enjoyed this book previously in the late 80’s. The passing of a further twenty-five years or so have brought it some clarity. I’ve got to highly recommend it, although there is one flaw that SHOULD push the rating just below 5 stars. More of that later.Sherman McCoy has it all. He makes a million dollars a year selling bonds for a top Wall Street firm. He lives in a 14 room, one-apartment-with-servants-wing-to-a-floor building on Park Avenue enjoying picturesque park views. His devoted wife–a little older than him and not as attractive as she once was–has carved out a career as an interior designer published in Architectural Digest, and his idealized 12 year old daughter attends the toniest private school with it’s own shuttle that tools up and down Park Ave. gathering golden children in the promised land. Topping it off is his mid-20’s mistress who he joins for the occasional impromptu tryst in another woman’s rent-controlled apartment ($333/month)that the mistress–trophy wife of a self-made Jewish gillionaire–coopts from her for $750/month.Sherman’s (SHUHMAN, the mistress calls him through her South Carolinian accent)fantasy life begins to come unravelled when he misses a turn off to Manhattan and ends up in the Bronx one evening after picking up his paramour at Kennedy airport. He goes from missplaced to lost and stops at an on-ramp because of an abandoned tire in his path. Two black youths appear from the side and a larger one come towards him somewhat quickly. This is the point where a spoiler opportunity presents itself to me, I’ll resist the temptation, but the upthrust is that one of the youths gets struck by Sherman’s car and the balance of the book is devoted to the downward spiral in Sherman’s life this produces.The only flaw in the book occurs when detectives first visit Sherman’s apartment to get a look at his car as a function of their hit-and-run investigation. The struck youth went to the hospital with a wrist injury, is treated and leaves with undiagnosed head trauma that later produces a coma (ultimately fatal). He told his mother he had been hit by a Mercedes with a license plate beginning with an R and a second number with a full ascender (my words, not his) like an “I” a “P” or an “F”. After a self-appointed civil rights leader/preacher looking for a fast buck produces PR that takes talk of the accident to viral extremes, the police launch their investigation that leads them to Sherman’s (and 500 other) doors to examine their cars. With so many possibilities, the police are just looking to eliminate the cars with no physical damage.Sherman blows the interview and arouses their suspicion. His behavior is not only ridiculous and outrageous, it’s also unbelievable. Here he is, a self-styled “Master of the Universe” (as a bond salesman) and he can’t act cool in a not even unexpected situation? Here, the author almost lost me. I was very disappointed.But he had to do this to produce the rest of the action of the book, which was well drawn and monumental. The author’s gift of language, or characterization, or descriptive narrative–I could go on–are beyond comparison. This is a masterful story-teller at the peak of his powers.For those of you that look for “messages” in better fiction, you see how revered American institutions can be prostituted and perverted by the whims of angry crowds and determined behind-the-scenes influencers. Courts aren’t supposed to function like the one in the Bronx, but, in context, it seems the most natural thing in the world.This is not Tom Wolfe’s best book, but it’s better than just about anyone elses.

⭐I read this book when it was first published and absolutely loved it. Thought it was a classic. I re-read it just now and was disappointed. It did not hold up. The characters, who I once thought were brilliantly portrayed now come across as comic book shallow. Too bad…

⭐At the beginning of the story, we meet a delusional Sherman McCoy. He believes he’s a Master of the Universe because he takes nine-digit orders from clients every other day. Yet McCoy is only a middleman: as his wife explains to their little daughter, “If you pass around enough slices of cake, then pretty soon you have enough crumbs to make a gigantic cake.” Besides, his elevation to a presumptive Master of the Universe was accidental: when he started in the bond department, the market was not that hot and his colleagues were known as “Bond Bores”. Nor did he have to fight his way into New York high society – thanks to his father, a famous corporate lawyer.Delusional, not despicable. Yes, Sherman is unfaithful to his wife; but… A professor’s daughter, she has always looked down on him “from a wholly fictive elevation” while spending his money on attempts at interior design. To her credit, she does not turn against McCoy when he falls on hard times. She takes their daughter and merely disappears, unlike Sherman’s duplicitous mistress.The gods enlighten Sherman in their usual way, through pain and disgrace. Cured of the ignorance that fed his hubris, the man turns into a fighter – unless I am reading too much into the final scene. No, I don’t think I am: this is not merely a story of a man stripped of his innocence – sorry, ignorance. Knowing Wolfe’s later work and his affinity for Zola, I can think of The Bonfire as one installment from a never-written McCoy family history. Otherwise, why mention William Sherman McCoy, the protagonist’s paternal grandfather, a hick from Knoxville, TN, in the eyes of aristocratic New Yorkers?I take it as a clue: there’s a fighting spirit, a certain stubbornness and stand-your-ground diehardism that run in the family and come out when the youngest McCoy is pushed to the wall. “In well-reared girls and boys, guilt and the instinct to obey the rules are reflexes, ineradicable ghosts in the machine.” True, but when Sherman faces a demented crowd, his fear and loathing erase this defeatist deference.By the way, why would a Southerner be named Sherman? My guess is because Knoxville is different: it’s in the east of Tennessee, by the mountains; incidentally, Charlotte Simmons of Wolfe’s third novel grew up a little further east, over the border in North Carolina. In 1861, East Tennessee voted to stay in the Union; Republican sympathies were strong; Knoxville was divided; pro-Union local guerrillas burned bridges during the 1861-63 Confederate occupation; the 1st Alabama cavalry regiment which escorted Sherman to the sea was largely Tennessean. So there’s “Sherman” – the hard-war general and the hard-war tank – and there’s “McCoy”, but which of them is the real one? – and there’s some obstinate farmer in the background who’d fight the slaveholders both sides of the Blue Ridge.

⭐I read this when it first came out and was blown away by the energy of the writing – an invigorating cautionary tale in which, refreshingly, almost none of the characters are spared from Wolfe’s acidic pen.What struck me (in the summer of 2020) is how relevant it all feels today, from the crude exploitation of ‘the mob’ to the tiering of the US justice system in which your income can profoundly influence your fate.A few of the reviews below have criticised the book for verbosity and unnecessary detail, which surprised me, in an era in which authors routinely take 500 pages to express an emotional landscape Graham Greene could have painted in a third of that. I don’t think it’s a fair criticism either. The novel is pacy and the scene-setting is there to contextualise the ‘vanities’ of the title.

⭐Enough has been written about it that I don’t need to dwell on the storyline. What is amazing is the style, the powers of observation, and — once in a while, in the most dense pages — an almost immeasurable multiplicity of things going on at the same time on the written page. I can honestly say I have never read anything quite like it.Also, the Introduction, by the author himself, is worth the book alone (i read the recent kindle edition by Vintage Books), and actually explains it better than any other literature review, what the author tried to do, which is a book “of” New York in the 70s, a “realist novel”, which by then was well out of fashion, or out of synch with the preferences of the literary “establishment”, who had written off realist novelists as ‘squares’ who actually thought you could take real life and spread it across the pages of a book. Yes, they could, and no one I have read has done it better than Tom Wolfe…You can get a visceral whiff of where Wolfe was coming from, when he writes about the “neo-fabulist” authors, as he calls them: “Many of those writers were brilliant. They could do things within the narrow limits they had set themselves that were more clever and more amusing than anyone could have ever imagined. But what was this lonely island they had moved to? After all, they, like me, happened to be alive in what was, for better or worse, the American century, the century in which we had become the mightiest military power in all history, capable of blowing up the world by turning two cylindrical keys in a missile silo but also capable, once it blew, of escaping to the stars in spaceships. We were alive in the first moment since the dawn of time in which man was able at last to break the bonds of Earth’s gravity and explore the rest of the universe. And, on top of that, we had created an affluence that reacher clear down to the level of mechanics and tradesmen on a scale that would have made the Sun King blink, so that on any given evening even a Neo-Fabulist’s or a Minimalist’s electrician or air-conditioning mechanic or burglar alarm repairman might very well be in Saint Kitts or Barbados or Puerto Vallarta wearing a Harry Belafonte cane-cutter shirt, open to the sternum, the better to reveal the gold chains twinkling in his chest hair, while he and his third wife sit on the terrace and have a little designer water before dinner…. What a feast was spread out before every writer in America! how could any writer resist plunging into it? I couldn’t”Enough said.

⭐I’m only halfway through reading this. I find the long descriptive passages covering characters and scenes too much and find I’m skimming these paragraphs. Wolfe is writing as though he’s giving descriptions for movie scenes. There is too much of this. I’d like the story to unfold more rapidly to hold my interest.

⭐I’m lucky to read 2/3 books per week, of various genres. I’ve never left a review before but feel I have to comment this time.I’ve never been so baffled/bored/mystified by a book……. I hate to give up and battled on for 27%, but then conceded that as I would never get my time back battling on with it I gave up.I really tried but in parts it was almost like it was written in code or an alien language…..or maybe it’s just ‘I didn’t get it’ .I really wanted to read about 1980’s New York but just could not engage with any of the characters at all and found it far too ‘wordy’ and descriptive about things I just did not understand.Anyway, on to my next book 😀

⭐Interesting setting in time mid 80s and so racist in New York. Not to blacks alone but overt distinctions made between Irish, Jewish, white (WASPS) but of course black worse. An education in New York at the time.Gripped by Wolfe’s ability to show the story through dialogue and action. I did not want this book to end.Struck how women are never portrayed sympathetically, no women’s characters are developed. That said the male characters are not sympathetically portrayed. All their faults and foibles are on show, their vanities. Love it!

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