TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87capbks.a

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                                                                                November 9, 1987

Books

The Haves and the Have-Mores


THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES by Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus &
Giroux; 659 pages; $19.95

"This is the decade of plutography," says Tom Wolfe, author of
such fireproof phrases as "radical chic" to describe affluent
activists of the '60s and "the Me decade" to define the
narcissistic '70s. Plutography is to money what pornography is
to sex, explains the 56- year-old pioneer of the New Journalism,
emphasizing that "today it is impossible to be too
ostentatious."  In Manhattan, where Wolfe and his wife, daughter
and son occupy a four-story town house in the coveted East 60s,
he notes that one of the latest examples of conspicuous display
is the stretch limousines lined up in front of what he calls
"this week's restaurant of the century."  Inside these land
yachts, the young and newly rich slurp drinks while waiting for
their names to be announced for the next available table. The
highest status will be conferred on the toff who gets embraced
by the restaurant's owner.

Wolfe has been chronicling the behavior of the city's haves and
have- mores since 1962, when he joined the New York Herald
Tribune as a general-assignment reporter and quickly became the
main attraction of the newspaper's Sunday magazine supplement.
His timing, like his trademark white suit, was impeccable and
dramatic. After two- stepping through the Eisenhower era,
America was ready to rock 'n' roll. Wolfe covered the arrival
of the Beatles for their first U.S. tour and caught the moment
with a description of hysterical fans throbbing like alien
protoplasm against the plate glass of the airport waiting room.
The story stretched conventional journalistic license, but few
readers could deny that his brightly tailored, soft- spoken
Virginian was up to something new.

His later magazine pieces about Southern stock-car racing,
California auto customizers, Manhattan's Pop art world, funky
fashions and the navel engagements of the self-awareness
movement confirmed Wolfe's originality. Unlike the reigning
intellectuals of the day, he took American mass culture at face
value, though not with a straight face. His New Journalism
combined the skills and stamina of an ace reporter with the
techniques of fiction, and it reached its peak in "The Right
Stuff, the 1979 recounting of the lives and times of the
Mercury astronauts.

To call The Bonfire of the Vanities Wolfe's first novel is to
make a distinction without too much difference. The ingeniously
rigged plot is clearly fictional, but the details of New York
City life, high and low, leap from the legman's notebook. The
novel first appeared in Rolling Stone four years ago and ran in
27 installments. Since then, Wolfe has thoroughly rewritten it.
The crucial change was to make the leading character a Wall
Street broker (pre Black Monday) instead of a writer. "Writers
are not much affected by scandal," says the author, "but bond
salesmen can be ruined."  Moreover, the alteration meant that
Wolfe had to study the breed in its habitat, to examine its
plumage, to listen to the roar of "well-educated young white
men baying for money."  In short, New Journalism shares much
with the traditional novel of manners and society. "Realism is
a plateau from which literature cannot back down," says Wolfe,
acknowledging his debt to Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens and Evelyn
Waugh.

Like these predecessors, Wolfe is a master of social satire; he
is, in fact, the best of his generation. Bonfire is merciless
and unrelenting in its depiction of New York as a city driven
by ethnic and racial hostility, political ambition and status.
What of idealism, ethics and refined impulses?  In the words
of one fulsome character, "fuhgedaboudit."  Action is motivated
by the seven deadly sins, distributed evenhandedly among the
city's blacks, Irish, Jews and that overlooked minority, the
rich Wasps.

Wolfe's main conceit is that the upper classes are especially
vulnerable to prejudicial treatment if they lose their
insulation. Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue and Southhampton, the
leading bond salesman at Pierce & Pierce, learns this harsh
lesson when he is arrested for hit-and-run driving and plummets
from a "Master of the Universe" to the Great White Defendant,"
the dream of every ambitious $36,000-a-year assistant district
attorney.

Middle-aged married female readers will be unsympathetic and
even gleeful about Sherman's downfall. He is driving his young
mistress Maria Ruskin home from Kennedy International Airport
and feeling on top of the world when he mistakenly turns off the
highway and gets lost in the South Bronx. There is a
confrontation with two black youths, a scuffle, a hasty escape
with the girlfriend now behind the wheel of his black Mercedes
sports car. There is also a suspicious thok! against the car.

Maria, a bed-wise South Carolina belle and wife of an aging
Jewish businessman who has made a fortune selling charter
flights to Mecca- bound Arabs, discourages Sherman from
reporting the incident to the police. Unfortunately, the mother
of the badly injured boy is a friend of the Rev. Reginald
Bacon's, whose specialty is political pressure and
misappropriating social-service funds for his private use, an
activity he justifies as "steam control."  Bacon is shrewd,
cunning, outrageous and, like the others shrewd, cunning,
outrageous characters in Bonfire, not necessarily bigger than
life.

Wolfe will most likely be denounced for creating comic
characters who accurately reflect familiar and self-important
fixtures in New York life. At the top of the heap are "social
X rays," rumpless women of a certain age who believe one cannot
be too rich or too thin. Sixtyish men of this stratum are
frequently accompanied by "lemon tarts," sleek, young blonds.
Sherman McCoy is a decent wellbred sort, neither more nor less
lustful than most confident 38-year-old males and particularly
amusing when he gives facts and figures about how one can go
broke in Manhattan on $1 million a year.

In the middle class is a Hasidic landlord who bugs his rent-
controlled apartments in the hope that he can learn of a
violation that will enable him to evict low-paying tenants.
Peter Fallow, the boozy London-expatriate reporter for
Manhattan's British-owned tabloid the City Light, is a major
contribution to the literature of journalistic sleaze. Lawrence
Kramer, an assistant district attorney in the Bronx, exudes the
resentment of a young man who has to live in a small, narrow,
$888-a-month apartment ("a slot") with his wife, new baby and
nurse (paid for by his mother-in-law). The underclass is
represented mainly by ghetto felons:  armed robbers who list
their occupations as "security guards" and young drug pushers
who have mastered "the Pimp Roll," a swaggering gait not
uncommon on the city's streets.

Wolfe's heroes are men who can be reckless in their commitments
to professionalism, another name for courage. He has admired
these types before, most fully in his portrait of Test Pilot
Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. In The Bonfire of the
Vanities, the type is represented by a feisty old Jewish judge,
an Irish criminal lawyer and an Irish investigator for the
D.A.'s office. Wolfe pays conditional tribute to what he
identifies ad Celtic machismo, a refusal to back off from
confrontations, and passes on the street theory that regardless
of race or background, all members of the New York City police
department eventually become Irish.

The provocations of Bonfire are not gratuitous. They are
embedded in convincing contexts and experienced through the
eyes, ears and nerve endings of the characters. This technique
is what makes Wolfe's journalism so vital and gives him
authority as a novelist. This, and his ability to handle an
imaginative and intricate plot that welds his descriptions of
dinner parties, restaurant games, Wall Street trading and
courthouse chaos into more than a tour de force. Even at more
than 600 pages, Bonfire moves with a swift comic logic. It has
become a critical cliche to say that a book is hard to put
down. Those who think that they can casually dip into this one,
fuhgedaboudit.

--By R.Z. Sheppard