The Bonfire of the Vanities

This article is about the novel; for the 1990 film based on it, see The Bonfire of the Vanities (film); for the historical event, see Bonfire of the Vanities.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1987 novel by Tom Wolfe. The story, a satire about ambition, racism, and greed in 1980s New York City, centers on three main characters: the successful, arrogant, and very self-conscious bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish Assistant District Attorney Larry Kramer, and British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow. Fallow's career is revived when he is asked to cover the investigation of a young black man who had been the victim of a hit and run by a white driver (Sherman McCoy's mistress, who was driving Sherman's car with Sherman in the passenger seat). When Sherman is identified as the owner of the car from the hit and run attack, Fallow is ordered to prepare a smear campaign against Sherman McCoy, who becomes the most hated man in New York City as a result.

The novel was a bestseller and a phenomenal success, even in comparison with Wolfe's other books. The title is a reference to a real life event, the Bonfire of the Vanities, which took place in 1497, in Florence, Italy, when the city was under the rule of the Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola. The story told in the book and the movie is not a retelling of this historic event, it merely used the phrase as a fitting title.

Novel

The plot revolves around Sherman McCoy, whose life as a so-called "Master of The Universe" on Wall Street is destroyed when his mistress, Maria Ruskin, runs over a black youth (Henry Lamb) while driving his car. Abe Weiss, a self-absorbed Bronx District Attorney up for re-election, decides to convict McCoy by any means necessary (including obtaining false testimony from Sherman's mistress) so that he can use the conviction of McCoy to sway the black residents of New York City to re-elect him. In the middle of the whole mess is Peter Fallow, a washed-up, drunken British journalist for the tabloid City Light. Fallow is given the opportunity of a lifetime when he is hand-selected by the City Light's owner to write a series of articles about the investigation of Sherman McCoy, condemning McCoy as a monster for his alleged crime and calling for his arrest and conviction.

In exchange, Peter Fallow becomes the paper's star writer and his career is reborn. However, Fallow quickly becomes disillusioned as the paper's owner allies himself with a local religious and political leader (Reverend Bacon), who is preparing to have the mother of the now braindead victim of the hit and run sue the hospital her son is in for not giving him proper treatment that could have saved him. His disillusionment is complete when he has a chance encounter with McCoy outside the courthouse. When McCoy's mistress flees the country with another man in order to avoid having to admit to being the real driver, Sherman's private investigator discovers a recording of an incriminating conversation made by the landlord of Sherman and Ruskin's rendezvous. McCoy uses the tape (which he claims to have recorded himself) to have the initial charges against him dropped. The novel ends with a near riot outside the courtroom in which McCoy loses his head and almost knocks down several protesters.

In a fictional New York Times article at the end of the book, we learn that Fallow has married a wealthy woman, and Maria (the mistress) has escaped prosecution while Sherman McCoy awaits trial for manslaughter.

Style and content

Bonfire was Tom Wolfe's first novel. Wolfe's works before the novel were non-fiction, journalistic articles and books. His literary and journalistic styles have much in common; specifically a fascination with the seemingly fantastic stories and surprising details in American life. Like his previous writing, Bonfire fuses intrigue, plot, and sociological detail.

For example, the plot relies on class conflicts in mid-1980s New York, and the exploitation of those conflicts by politicians and others, personal conflicts, and culture of the Bronx Courthouse. In textured and lengthy chapters that could have been inspired by Émile Zola, Wolfe tells the reader that the court typist is, in a strange reversal, the haughtiest, best-paid employee; while the judge, usually superior and powerful in other courts, must divide his time equally between intimidating the crowd, the defenders, and the district attorneys in an (often futile) attempt to keep order.

Wolfe provides amusing asides on the gait of defendants, the clothing and peculiar accents of New Yorkers in every tier of society. Author Frank Conroy, in a New York Times Book Review article on the novel, said he found this attention to detail tiresome, especially the attention to accents. Wolfe responded that this attention to detail is essential and lamentably absent in most contemporary literature. In an article in Harper's Magazine, Wolfe chastised modern authors for making excursions into mythic fantasy worlds in order to keep the novel fresh and interesting. It is his belief that journalistic research reveals a world more interesting and complex than anything a single author can dream up.

Wolfe did not intend his work to be a roman a clef; the characters in Bonfire are not fictionalized accounts of real-life figures. According to Wolfe, the characters are composites of many individuals and cultural observations. In the past, Wolfe has written long descriptions of real-life people, and not always favorably; he has said that if he wanted to profile (or lampoon) individuals, he would have done so from a non-fiction perspective since he has not shied away from doing so previously.