Tom Wolfe wrote the first draft of his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine, in 1984 and 1985, and he was only halfway through before his story was, as the phrase goes, overtaken by events. Novels are not supposed to be overtaken by events, of course. We’re used to thinking of them as works of pure invention, and thus not susceptible to getting tripped up by the morning’s headlines. But Wolfe’s ambition was as much reportorial as imaginative. He wanted to capture the grisly carnival of New York City at the mid-point of the 1980s: roiling, putrescent New York, bubbling with irreconcilable ethnic hatreds, wobbling between unimaginable wealth and horrifying squalor, exploited by cynical pols, money-grubbers, and charlatans. He captured it only too well.
To take an example that Wolfe related several years later: In an early Rolling Stone installment, he had described one of his characters, an assistant DA in the Bronx, riding the subway, “his eyes jumping about in a bughouse manner.” In a future chapter, the author had planned to explain the young man’s subway-phobia: He had once been attacked and robbed by a “wolf pack” of thugs on a train in the Bronx. This, in any case, was Wolfe’s intention. But not long after the early chapter was published, a real-life wolf pack descended on the tightly wound subway-rider Bernhard Goetz, with spectacular consequences. Wolfe’s little plot twist was undone. “Now how could I,” he wrote, “proceed with my plan? People would say, This poor fellow Wolfe, he has no imagination. He reads the newspapers, gets these obvious ideas . . . . So I abandoned the plan, dropped it altogether.”
There are other examples. Wolfe gave us Rev. Reginald Bacon, a Harlem preacher and poverty pimp who uses the accidental death of a black teenager to rouse the rabble. Three months after the novel was published, the Tawana Brawley hoax brought the indescribable Rev. Al Sharpton to prominence. Sharpton, as Wolfe noted, made Bacon look like a divinity student. Then there was Howard Beach, and Crown Heights — spasms of ferocious race hatred that seemed old news after Bonfire. And when Wolfe recorded with almost sensual precision the money-delirium of Reagan-era Wall Street, the excesses seemed impossible to sustain. Sure enough: As the novel hit the bookstores in late October 1987, the market crashed.
“Not for a moment did I ever think of The Bonfire of the Vanities as prophetic,” Wolfe has written. But the comment is too modest. For its prescience, and for much else, Bonfire was the most successful and celebrated novel of its day. For people of a certain cohort — college educated, urban-dwelling, now pushing 40 or 50 — Bonfire comes as close to a universal literary experience as their generation is ever likely to possess. You could go to a party and talk about it with almost anyone, as, more commonly, you can talk about a hit movie and assume that just about everybody has seen it. Tout le monde, as Wolfe likes to say, read Bonfire (and called it that, by the way: just Bonfire). It’s still in print, and ten years to the month after its publication, it deserves another visit. It still retains the power to dazzle, and to disappoint. And to instruct as well — in ways even its far-sighted author could not have foreseen.
The first thing you notice re-reading Tom Wolfe’s novel is Tom Wolfe. The same is true of every Tom Wolfe book, for even in his journalism his literary talent is almost blinding — preposterously large. There seems to be nothing he can’t do with words. His touch is always exact, always sure. The prose is famously idiosyncratic, with its italics and exclamation points and multiplying ellipses, but to achieve his powerful effects he relies on these gimmicks much less than his critics have maintained. Mark Twain said that the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between a flash of lightning and a firefly. Wolfe’s paragraphs are a series of lightning bolts. Here he introduces us to the hostess of a Fifth Avenue dinner party.
A blazing boney little woman popped out from amid all the clusters in the entry gallery and came toward them. She was an X ray with a teased blond pageboy bob and many tiny grinning teeth. Her emaciated body was inserted into a black-and-red dress with ferocious puffed shoulders, a very narrow waist, and a long skirt. Her face was wide and round — but without an ounce of flesh on it . . . . Her clavicle stuck out so far Sherman had the feeling he could reach out and pick up the two big bones. He could see lamplight through her rib cage.
Every page offers a half-dozen exquisitely observed details These range from pitch-perfect dialogue –“He galvanizes people to challenge the power structure,” a left-wing lawyer says, with a straight face, of Rev. Bacon — to Wolfe’s well-known obsession with clothes. Some of the sartorial references now seem incomprehensible. “He wore a white necktie with a black crisscross pattern, the sort of necktie that Anwar Sadat used to wear.” (Anwar Sadat?) More effectively he dwells on the minutiae of work and money — the minutiae, that is, that overwhelm and consume us all but that most novelists overlook, for misbegotten reasons of taste, presumably. The book’s main character, Sherman McCoy, is going broke while earning a million dollars a year; Wolfe takes us through the balance sheets to show us how, with figures rounded off to the nearest thousand.
Wolfe’s most unexpected gift is shown in his handling of the book’s enormous plot. At every turn of the wheel the gears engage and disengage with Swiss precision To sketch the famous story one more time: Sherman is a bond trader, living with his wife and trophy daughter in a $ 2.5 million co-op on Park Avenue. His principle of urban living is “Insulation! That was the ticket. If you want to live in New York . . . you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate, meaning insulate yourself from those people ” But those people keep obtruding One night, Sherman and his mistress end up on a deserted Bronx street in his $ 48,000 Mercedes They are confronted by two young black men, and in the ensuing panic one of the kids is hit by the car, falls into a coma, and eventually dies. Sherman and his mistress escape back to the safety of Manhattan But within days the insulation begins to unravel.
Bonfire is a novel of inversions. A novelist of an earlier time — say, one of the great realists that Wolfe admires, like Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis – – would spin out from this accident a tale of urban neglect, turning the black teenager’s fate into a parable of the establishment’s indifference. But in Bonfire, in 1980s New York, where the sky “glows as if inflamed by fever,” the forces of the new establishment are mobilized against Sherman. The unlucky teenager is inflated into an “honor student,” the “pride of a South Bronx housing project,” by a tabloid desperate to appease the city’s organized race hustlers. The Bronx district attorney sees in Sherman the answer to his prayers for a “Great White Defendant.” Rev. Bacon plays the city’s media like a calliope, to his own aggrandizement. Sherman’s life collapses, and by the novel’s bitter close he is a “professional defendant,” with the vultures closing in “to devour at leisure the last plump white meat on the bones of capitalism.”
Bonfire carries echoes, some subtle, some less so, of earlier American classics. A hit-and-run accident proves the undoing of Jay Gatsby as it does of Sherman McCoy, for instance — but with a crucial difference When the dust clears in Fitzgerald’s novel, the parvenu Gatsby is dead, the low-born Myrtle and her husband are dead, and the aristocrat Daisy survives. In Gatsby’s America the aristocrats always sail off untouched, regardless of the wreckage they leave in their wake. But in Bonfire, it’s the aristocrat who’s ruined, and the parvenu (Sherman’s mistress, who drove the car as it hit the teenager) is the one who survives, even flourishes. From Gatsby to Bonfire, the country has changed — been turned on its head, in fact.
Not that Wolfe treats Sherman sympathetically; with rare exceptions, Wolfe treats none of his characters sympathetically. The description of the party hostess, quoted above, is notable not only for its exactness and humor but also for its cruelty. Wolfe’s characters are clouded by self-delusion, motivated by vanity alone; he doesn’t like them and neither do we. For that matter, they don’t even like one another. The layers of mutual contempt reach a fugue-like complexity. One scene brings together a group of British expatriates at a favorite watering hole. Being British, they have resolved not to pay the tab, and so look for an American to pay it. They ask the minor character Ed Fiske to join them, and then pretend to care about his boring conversation.
The Brits hung on every word with rapt and beaming faces, as if he were the most brilliant raconteur they had come across in the New World. They chuckled, they laughed, they repeated the tag end of his sentences, like a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus. Mr. Ed Fiske kept talking, gaining steadily in confidence and fluency. The drink had hit the spot. What admiring British faces all around him! How they beamed! They did indeed appreciate the art of conversation! With casual largesse he ordered a round of drinks . . .
. . . until one by one the Brits slip away, sticking him with the $ 200 bill. The scene is incidental to the plot, and it’s very funny and superbly drawn, but it’s unsettling nonetheless. It captures in miniature the author’s attitude to his creations: The Brits despise Ed Fiske for his delusion and vanity, and Wolfe despises them for despising him, but in the end he finds Ed Fiske as appalling as they do. There’s something chilly at the center of the bonfire, a lump of ice where the book’s heart should be. Sherman himself is merely an instrument of his own vanity and delusion, and so when his life collapses it’s not so much a tragedy as a comeuppance. The fiery trials he passes through burn away his conceit and self-satisfaction, and alone among the major characters he at last sees himself and his position in life unblinkered. And in the New York of Bonfire, his hard-won self-awareness is a state indistinguishable from madness. By the end Sherman is a freak — carrion for society’s vultures. But he had it coming.
There is one wholly admirable character in Bonfire: the old judge who tries Sherman’s case. Mike Kovitsky works in the courts of the Bronx County Building. “They had been built at a time, the early 1930s, when it was still assumed that the very look of a courtroom should proclaim the gravity and omnipotence of the rule of law.” Kovitsky embodies this older, higher aspiration, but to no effect. Even he succumbs finally to Wolfe’s fatalism.
Wolfe has elsewhere remarked how much he admires the scene from Huckleberry Finn in which Colonel Sherburn faces down a mob that has come to lynch him. With the rabble at his doorstep, Sherburn appears at an upper window, a shotgun cradled in his arms. “The idea of you lynching anybody!” Sherburn shouts. “It’s amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! . . . Why a man’s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind –as long as it’s daytime and you’re not behind him . . . . Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole.”
The “crowd washed back sudden,” and the lesson is unmistakable: The courage of an individual, of a real man, will by right triumph over the mob. Kovitsky is such a man, too, and at Bonfire’s climax, he chooses to face down the lawless herd of bellowing hysterics gathered outside the Bronx County Building. But . . .
At that moment Kovitsky threw open both glass doors in front of him. His robes billowed out like enormous black wings . . . Kovitsky stopped in the doorway, arms outstretched. The moment lengthened . . . lengthened . . . The arms dropped.
The billowing wings collapsed against his frail body. He turned around and walked back inside the lobby. His eyes were down, and he was muttering.
The mob rages on, and honorable men like Kovitsky find themselves powerless before the consuming bonfire.
What we have here, in other words, is a profoundly pessimistic book. Its plot spins and buzzes and races along with great humor and enormous energy, but always under a low overhang of Spenglerian gloom. There are remarkably few anachronisms in Bonfire, ten years on –Wolfe has one male character wear an earring, for example, to signal that he’s a street thug; nowadays even bond traders wear earrings. But the largest anachronism, a reader notes today with some relief, is precisely Wolfe’s pessimism. After all, the economic boom of the 1980s is still humming in the ’90s; New York itself is a vastly cleaner, safer place than the city Wolfe described. The need to insulate, insulate, is less now than it has been in forty years. Even the graffti on the subway cars, so lovingly described in Bonfire, have been cleaned up. And the book’s candor about race, which created such a stir when the book carne out and which branded Wolfe a racist in the eyes of his more hysterical critics, is only mildly more frank than what you’d hear from a Steven Bochco TV series in 1997.
In one last strange inversion, we may have Wolfe to thank for this, at least in part. With courage and consummate skill, he wrote the most popular novel of the decade as a declamation of where it all was heading. But, as they say these days, we seem to have decided not to go there. The Apocalypse that Bonfire pointed to has been averted, for now. This is one prophecy that Tom Wolfe, the most prophetic and gifted writer of his time, got wrong.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
