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Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
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(Paperback - Reprint)
- Pub. Date: March 2008
- 552pp
- Sales Rank: 20,483
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: March 2008
- Publisher: Picador USA
- Format: Paperback, 552pp
- Sales Rank: 20,483
- ISBN-13: 9780312427573
- ISBN: 0312427573
- Edition Description: Reprint
Synopsis
Thirty-eight-year-old Sherman McCoy, who lives on Park Avenue, has a wife and a high-maintenance mistress, and is a successful Wall Street bond trader, faces notoriety and the criminal justice system when he is arrested for hit-and-run driving in the South Bronx.
People Magazine
Brillian —Bonfire illumines the modern madness that [was] New York in the 1980s with the intense precision of a laser beam.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Tom Wolfe's high-wire act of language has provided a sort of cultural funhouse mirror ever since he started publishing in the mid-1960s, first as a journalist and later as the acclaimed author of novels The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. Wolfe occasionally raises hackles, and he always provokes a response.
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
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- Ratings: 24Reviews: 13
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A complex and significan bookby Anonymous
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April 22, 2008: There are many things about Bonfire of the Vanities that was complex and hard to comprehend, yet I find the book to be very interesting because of the amount of body it has to it. It is a rather long read but once one can get past the first hundred or so pages the story starts to fall into itself. I don't know if just anyone could pick this book up, I'd say one must be interested in it in order to get through it.
Just perfectby Anonymous
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April 18, 2008: In my opinion this book had been oustanding this is because, as a person who doesn't speak English, I have found this book very challenging, lots of hard words, that would help later on, thats if you were getting into a lawying school, I would certainly recomend this book because it happens to be written in a style where there are many puzzle pieces that you would have to put together. I am sure people that have read this book would agree, that it is very interesting. Because this book is just plain fantastic I really recomend it for an English class too.
Fact File
Name:
Tom Wolfe
Also Known As:
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (full name)
Current Home:
New York, New York
Date of Birth:
March 02, 1931
Place of Birth:
Richmond, Virginia
Education:
B.A. (cum laude), Washington and Lee University, 1951; Ph.D. in American Studies, Yale University, 1957
Awards:
National Book Award for The Right Stuff, 1980
Biography
Tom Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He was educated at Washington and Lee (B.A., 1951) and Yale (Ph.D., American Studies, 1957) Universities. In December 1956, he took a job as a reporter on the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union. This was the beginning of a ten-year newspaper career, most of it as a general assignment reporter. For six months in 1960 he served as The Washington Post's Latin American correspondent and won the Washington Newspaper Guild's foreign news prize for his coverage of Cuba.
In 1962 he became a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and, in addition, one of the two staff writers (Jimmy Breslin was the other) of New York magazine, which began as the Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement. While still a daily reporter for the Herald Tribune, he completed his first book, a collection of articles about the flamboyant Sixties written for New York and Esquire and published in 1965 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The book became a bestseller and established Wolfe as a leading figure in the literary experiments in nonfiction that became known as the New Journalism.
In 1968 he published two bestsellers on the same day: The Pump House Gang, made up of more articles about life in the Sixties, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a nonfiction story of the hippie era. In 1970 he published Radical Chick & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a highly controversial book about racial friction in the United States. The first section was a detailed account of a party Leonard Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers in his Park Avenue duplex, and the second portrayed the inner workings of the government's poverty program.
Even more controversial was Wolfe's 1975 book on the American art world, The Painted Word. The art world reacted furiously, partly because Wolfe kept referring to it as the "art village," depicting it as a network of no more than three thousand people, of whom about three hundred lived outside the New York metropolitan area. In 1976 he published another collection, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, which included his well-known essay "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening."
In 1979 Wolfe completed a book he had been at work on for more than six years, an account of the rocket airplane experiments of the post-World War II era and the early space program focusing upon the psychology of the rocket pilots and the astronauts and the competition between them. The Right Stuff became a bestseller and won the American Book Award for nonfiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the Columbia Journalism Award.
"The right stuff," "radical chic," and "the Me Decade" (sometimes altered to "the Me Generation") all became popular phrases, but Wolfe seems proudest of "good ol' boy," which he had introduced to the written language in a 1964 article in Esquire about Junior Johnson, the North Carolina stock car-racing driver, which was called "The Last American Hero."
Wolfe had been illustrating his own work in newspapers and magazines since the 1950s, and in 1977 began doing a monthly illustrated feature for Harper's magazine called "In Our Time". The book, In Our Time, published in 1980, featured these drawings and many others. In 1981 he wrote a companion to The Painted Word entitled From Bauhaus to Our House, about the world of American architecture.
In 1984 and 1985 Wolfe wrote his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in serial form against a deadline of every two weeks for Rolling Stone magazine. It came out in book form in 1987. A story of the money-feverish 1980s in New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities was number one of the New York Times bestseller list for two months and remained on the list for more than a year, selling over 800,000 copies in hardcover. It also became the number-one bestselling paperback, with sales above two million.
In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper's magazine called "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast." In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zola-esque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporter -- as he had done in writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s.
In 1996, Wolfe wrote the novella Ambush at Fort Bragg as a two-part series for Rolling Stone. In 1997 it was published as a book in France and Spain and as an audiotape in the United States. An account of a network television magazine show's attempt to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg into confessing to the murder of one of their comrades, it grew out of what had been intended as one theme in a novel Wolfe was working on at that time. The novel, A Man in Full, was published in November of 1998. The book's protagonists are a sixty-year old Atlanta real estate developer whose empire has begun a grim slide toward bankruptcy and a twenty-three-year-old manual laborer who works in the freezer unit of a wholesale food warehouse in Alameda County, California, owned by the developer. Before the story ends, both have had to face the question of what is it that makes a man "a man in full" now, at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium.
A Man in Full headed the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks and has sold nearly 1.4 million copies in hardcover. The book's tremendous commercial success, its enthusiastic welcome by reviewers, and Wolfe's appearance on the cover of Time magazine in his trademark white suit plus a white homburg and white kid gloves -- along with his claim that his sort of detailed realism was the future of the American novel, if it was going to have one -- provoked a furious reaction among other American novelists, notably John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving.
Wolfe's latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, explores the unique antics of college life. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sheila; his daughter, Alexandra; and his son, Tommy.
Author biography courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
From the Publisher
Vintage Tom Wolfe, 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)
People Magazine
Brillian —Bonfire illumines the modern madness that [was] New York in the 1980s with the intense precision of a laser beam.
Newsweek
It’s the human comedy, on a skyscraper scale and at a taxi-meter pace...
People
Brilliant...
Washington Post Book
A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right.
Philadelphia Inquirer
A smash...
Business Week
Marvelous...
New York Times Book Review
A big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won’t let go.
Wall Street Journal
Impossible to put down...
Washington Post Book World
Richly entertaining...
New York Times
Delicious fun...
Publishers Weekly
In his spellbinding first novel, Wolfe proves that he has the right stuff to write propulsively engrossing fiction. Both his cynical irony and sense of the ridiculous are perfectly suited to his subject: the roiling, corrupt, savage, ethnic melting pot that is New York City. Ranging from the rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue to the dingy courtrooms of the Bronx, this is a totally credible tale of how the communities uneasily coexist and what happens when they collide.
On a clandestine date with his mistress one night, top Wall Street investment banker and snobbish WASP Sherman McCoy misses his turn on the thruway and gets lost in the South Bronx; his Mercedes hits and seriously injures a young black man. The incident is inflated by a manipulative black leader, a district attorney seeking reelection and a sleazy tabloid reporter into a full-blown scandal, a political football and a hokey morality play.
Wolfe adroitly swings his focus from one to another of the people involved: the protagonist McCoy; Kramer, the assistant D.A.; two detectives one Irish, the other Jewish; a slimy, alcoholic British journalist; an outraged judge, etc. He has an infallible, mocking ear for New York voices, rendering with equal precision the defense lawyer's "gedoutdahere,'' the deliberate bad grammar ("that don't help matters'') of the wily "reverend'' and the clenched-teeth WASP locution ("howjado''). His reporter's eye has seized every gritty detail of the criminal justice system, and he is also acute in rendering the hierarchy at a society party. He convincingly equates the jungles of Wall Street and the Bronx: in both places men casually use the same four-letter expletives and, no matter what their standing on the social ladder, find that power kindles their lust for nubile young women.
Erupting from the first line with noise, color, tension and immediacy, this immensely entertaining novel accurately mirrors a system that has broken down: from the social code of basic good manners to the fair practices of the law. It is safe to predict that the book will stand as a brilliant evocation of New York's class, racial and political structure in the 1980s.
Michael Rogers - Library Journal
Wolfe's first foray into fiction was a Goliath success, becoming a No. 1 best seller nationwide as well as morphing into a feature film (which, alas, stunk badly). It's a laugh-out-loud dark comedy in addition to being a page-turning tale of power, politics, greed, and justice.
Library Journal
Insulation is the key to living in New York, according to millionaire bond salesman Sherman McCoy, insulation from "them.'' So when he makes a wrong turn one night and finds himself driving through the South Bronx in his Mercedes, he panics. In his haste to get back to Manhattan he sideswipes a pedestrian; made tabloid news by a sleazy reporter, the incident has every politician in town crying for McCoy's blood. As some critics have long maintained, Wolfe's genius may be better suited to fiction than to journalism; his novel has all the knowledge, insight, and wit of earlier works but tones down the notorious stylistic excesses. The result is not just Wolfe's most successful book to date but one of the most impressive novels of the decade. -- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law School Library, Los Angeles
Washington Post Book
A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right.
Loading...Product Details
- Pub. Date: March 2008
- Publisher: Picador USA
- Format: Paperback, 552pp
- Sales Rank: 20,483
- ISBN-13: 9780312427573
- ISBN: 0312427573
- Edition Description: Reprint
Read an Excerpt
The Master of the UniverseAt that very moment, in the very sort of Park Avenue co-op apartment that so obsessed the Mayor ... twelve-foot ceilings ... two wings, one for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who own the place and one for the help ... Sherman McCoy was kneeling in his front hall trying to put a leash on a dachshund. The floor was a deep green marble, and it went on and on. It led to a five-foot-wide walnut staircase that swept up in a sumptuous curve to the floor above. It was the sort of apartment the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York and, for that matter, all over the world. But Sherman burned only with the urge to get out of this fabulous spread of his for thirty minutes.
So here he was, down on both knees, struggling with a dog. The dachshund, he figured, was his exit visa.
Looking at Sherman McCoy, hunched over like that and dressed the way he was, in his checked shirt, khaki pants, and leather boating moccasins, you would have never guessed what an imposing figure he usually cut. Still young ... thirty-eight years old ... tall ... almost six-one ... terrific posture ... terrific to the point of imperious ... as imperious as his daddy, the Lion of Dunning Sponget ... a full head of sandy-brown hair ... a long nose ... a prominent chin ... He was proud of his chin. The McCoy chin; the Lion had it, too. It was a manly chin, a big round chin such as Yale men used to have in those drawings by Gibson and Leyendecker, an aristocratic chin, if you want to know what Sherman thought. He was a Yale man himself.
But at this moment his entire appearance was supposed to say:“I’m only going out to walk the dog.”
The dachshund seemed to know what was ahead. He kept ducking away from the leash. The beast’s stunted legs were deceiving. If you tried to lay hands on him, he turned into a two-foot tube packed with muscle. In grappling with him, Sherman had to lunge. And when he lunged, his kneecap hit the marble floor, and the pain made him angry.
“C’mon, Marshall,” he kept muttering. “Hold still, damn it.”
The beast ducked again, and he hurt his knee again, and now he resented not only the beast but his wife, too. It was his wife’s delusions of a career as an interior decorator that had led to this ostentatious spread of marble in the first place. The tiny black grosgrain cap on the toe of a woman’s shoe —
— she was standing there.
“You’re having a time, Sherman. What on earth are you doing?”
Without looking up: “I’m taking Marshall for a wa-a-a-a-a-alk.”
Walk came out as a groan, because the dachshund attempted a fishtail maneuver and Sherman had to wrap his arm around the dog’s midsection.
“Did you know it was raining?”
Still not looking up: “Yes, I know.” Finally he managed to snap the leash on the animal’s collar.
“You’re certainly being nice to Marshall all of a sudden.”
Wait a minute. Was this irony? Did she suspect something? He looked up.
But the smile on her face was obviously genuine, altogether pleasant ... a lovely smile, in fact ... Still a very good-looking woman, my wife ... with her fine thin features, her big clear blue eyes, her rich brown hair ... But she’s forty years old! ... No getting around it ... Today good-looking ... Tomorrow they’ll be talking about what a handsome woman she is ... Not her fault ... But not mine, either!
“I have an idea,” she said. “Why don’t you let me walk Marshall? Or I’ll get Eddie to do it. You go upstairs and read Campbell a story before she goes to sleep. She’d love it. You’re not home this early very often. Why don’t you do that?”
He stared at her. It wasn’t a trick! She was sincere! And yet zip zip zip zip zip zip zip with a few swift strokes, a few little sentences, she had ... tied him in knots! — thongs of guilt and logic! Without even trying!
The fact that Campbell might be lying in her little bed — my only child! — the utter innocence of a six-year-old! — wishing that he would read her a bedtime story ... while he was ... doing whatever it was he was now doing ... Guilt! ... The fact that he usually got home too late to see her at all ... Guilt on top of guilt! ... He doted on Campbell! — loved her more than anything in the world! ... To make matters worse — the logic of it! The sweet wifely face he was now staring at had just made a considerate and thoughtful suggestion, a logical suggestion ... so logical he was speechless! There weren’t enough white lies in the world to get around such logic! And she was only trying to be nice!
“Go ahead,” she said. “Campbell will be so pleased. I’ll tend to Marshall.”
The world was upside down. What was he, a Master of the Universe, doing down here on the floor, reduced to ransacking his brain for white lies to circumvent the sweet logic of his wife? The Masters of the Universe were a set of lurid, rapacious plastic dolls that his otherwise perfect daughter liked to play with. They looked like Norse gods who lifted weights, and they had names such as Dracon, Ahor, Mangelred, and Blutong. They were unusually vulgar, even for plastic toys. Yet one fine day, in a fit of euphoria, after he had picked up the telephone and taken an order for zero-coupon bonds that had brought him a $50,000 commission, just like that, this very phrase had bubbled up into his brain. On Wall Street he and a few others — how many? — three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? — had become precisely that ... Masters of the Universe. There was ... no limit whatsoever! Naturally he had never so much as whispered this phrase to a living soul. He was no fool. Yet he couldn’t get it out of his head. And here was the Master of the Universe, on the floor with a dog, hog-tied by sweetness, guilt, and logic ... Why couldn’t he (being a Master of the Universe) simply explain it to her? Look, Judy, I still love you and I love our daughter and I love our home and I love our life, and I don’t want to change any of it — it’s just that I, a Master of the Universe, a young man still in the season of the rising sap, deserve more from time to time, when the spirit moves me —
— but he knew he could never put any such thought into words. So resentment began to bubble up into his brain ... In a way she brought it on herself, didn’t she ... Those women whose company she now seems to prize ... those ... those ... The phrase pops into his head at that very instant: social X rays ... They keep themselves so thin, they look like X-ray pictures ... You can see lamplight through their bones ... while they’re chattering about interiors and landscape gardening ... and encasing their scrawny shanks in metallic Lycra tubular tights for their Sports Training classes ... And it hasn’t helped any, has it! ... See how drawn her face and neck look ... He concentrated on her face and neck ... drawn ... No doubt about it ... Sports Training ... turning into one of them —
He managed to manufacture just enough resentment to ignite the famous McCoy temper.
He could feel his face grow hot. He put his head down and said, “Juuuuuudy ...” It was a shout stifled by teeth. He pressed the thumb and the first two fingers of his left hand together and held them in front of his clamped jaws and blazing eyes, and he said:
“Look ... I’m all — set — to — walk — the — dog ... So I’m — going — out — to — walk — the — dog ... Okay?”
Halfway through it, he knew it was totally out of proportion to ... to ... but he couldn’t hold back. That, after all, was the secret of the McCoy temper ... on Wall Street ... wherever ... the imperious excess.
Judy’s lips tightened. She shook her head.
“Please do what you want,” she said tonelessly. Then she turned away and walked across the marble hall and ascended the sumptuous stairs.
Still on his knees, he looked at her, but she didn’t look back. Please do what you want. He had run right over her. Nothing to it. But it was a hollow victory.
Another spasm of guilt —
The Master of the Universe stood up and managed to hold on to the leash and struggle into his raincoat. It was a worn but formidable rubberized British riding mac, full of flaps, straps, and buckles. He had bought it at Knoud on Madison Avenue. Once, he had considered its aged look as just the thing, after the fashion of the Boston Cracked Shoe look. Now he wondered. He yanked the dachshund along on the leash and went from the entry gallery out into the elevator vestibule and pushed the button.
Rather than continue to pay around-the-clock shifts of Irishmen from Queens and Puerto Ricans from the Bronx $200,000 a year to run the elevators, the apartment owners had decided two years ago to convert the elevators to automatic. Tonight that suited Sherman fine. In this outfit, with this squirming dog in tow, he didn’t feel like standing in an elevator with an elevator man dressed up like an 1870 Austrian army colonel. The elevator descended — and came to a stop two floors below. Browning. The door opened, and the smooth-jowled bulk of Pollard Browning stepped on. Browning looked Sherman and his country outfit and the dog up and down and said, without a trace of a smile, “Hello, Sherman.”
“Hello, Sherman” was on the end of a ten-foot pole and in a mere four syllables conveyed the message: “You and your clothes and your animal are letting down our new mahogany-paneled elevator.”
Sherman was furious but nevertheless found himself leaning over and picking the dog up off the floor. Browning was the president of the building’s co-op board. He was a New York boy who had emerged from his mother’s loins as a fifty-year-old partner in Davis Polk and president of the Downtown Association. He was only forty but had looked fifty for the past twenty years. His hair was combed back smoothly over his round skull. He wore an immaculate navy suit, a white shirt, a shepherd’s check necktie, and no raincoat. He faced the elevator door, then turned his head, took another look at Sherman, said nothing, and turned back.
Sherman had known him ever since they were boys at the Buckley School. Browning had been a fat, hearty, overbearing junior snob who at the age of nine knew how to get across the astonishing news that McCoy was a hick name (and a hick family), as in Hatfields and McCoys, whereas he, Browning, was a true Knickerbocker. He used to call Sherman “Sherman McCoy the Mountain Boy.”
When they reached the ground floor, Browning said, “You know it’s raining, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Browning looked at the dachshund and shook his head. “Sherman McCoy. Friend to man’s best friend.”
Sherman felt his face getting hot again. He said, “That’s it?”
“What’s it?”
“You had from the eighth floor to here to think up something bright, and that’s it?” It was supposed to sound like amiable sarcasm, but he knew his anger had slipped out around the edges.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Browning, and he walked on ahead. The doorman smiled and nodded and held the door open for him. Browning walked out under the awning to his car. His chauffeur held the car door open for him. Not a drop of rain touched his glossy form, and he was off, smoothly, immaculately, into the swarm of red taillights heading down Park Avenue. No ratty riding mac encumbered the sleek fat back of Pollard Browning.
In fact, it was raining only lightly, and there was no wind, but the dachshund was having none of it. He was beginning to struggle in Sherman’s arms. The power of the little bastard! He put the dog down on the runner under the awning and then stepped out into the rain with the leash. In the darkness the apartment buildings on the other side of the avenue were a serene black wall holding back the city’s sky, which was a steaming purple. It glowed, as if inflamed by a fever.
Hell, it wasn’t so bad out here. Sherman pulled, but the dog dug into the runner with his toenails.
“Come on, Marshall.”
The doorman was standing outside the door, watching him.
“I don’t think he’s too happy about it, Mr. McCoy.”
“I’m not, either, Eddie.” And never mind the commentary, thought Sherman. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, Marshall.”
By now Sherman was out in the rain giving the leash a pretty good pull, but the dachshund wasn’t budging. So he picked him up and took him off the rubber runner and set him down on the sidewalk. The dog tried to bolt for the door. Sherman couldn’t give him any more slack on the leash or else he was going to be right back where he started. So now he was leaning one way and the dog was leaning the other, with the leash taut between them. It was a tug-of-war between a man and a dog ... on Park Avenue. Why the hell didn’t the doorman get back in the building where he belonged?
Sherman gave the leash a real jerk. The dachshund skidded forward a few inches on the sidewalk. You could hear his toenails scraping. Well, maybe if he dragged him hard enough, he would give up and start walking just to keep from being dragged.
“C’mon, Marshall! We’re only going around the corner!”
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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