DAVID MYERS
REVIEW
TOM WOLFE'S BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES
A SATIRE WITH TRAGIC OVERTONES
Tom Wolfe. The Bonfire of the Vanities. London, Jonathon Cape, 1988.
ISBN 02 240 24396.
As Tom Wolfe implies in his mock-heroic dedication of The Bonfire
of the Vanities to counsellor Eddie Hayes ("who walked among the flames,
pointing at the lurid lights'), this novel is a descent into hell. But The
Bonfire of the Vanities is a modern epic in an age of relativism, cynicism
and eclecticism and does not aspire to pose as neo-classical tragedy. Instead
it thumbs its nose at the pretensions of high art, presenting itself with the
breeziness and the lurid overwrite of a comic book. But behind this opening
facadeof comic book entertainment, Wolfe is busy engineering a plot that
opens out into a satiric panorama of New York and also has enough
suspense and twists and turns to be read as detective fiction. This is a
detective novel in which we sit on the collective edge of our armchairs for
almost seven hundred pages worrying whether the relatively innocent
fugitive from the scene of the crime will be caught and convicted. But at the
same time we are studying a different kind of detective novel: we are
studying how Tom Wolfe catches and convicts a whole legal system of selfseeking vanity and cynical scapegoat-hunting.
As satire, The Bonfire of the Vanities is not only an indictment of
the political perversion of criminal justice, it also offers a well-informed
picture of jungle-warfare careerism in New York and the pretensions and
vanities of all classes from the superrich of Manhattan to the streetwise poor
of the Bronx and Harlem. Oddly enough, at the same time as the novel is
building up towards a satiric climax of universal venality, deceitfulness and
hypocritical opportunism, it is also quietly building up a totally unexpected
tragic characterisation of the protagonist and scapegoat, Sherman McCoy.
Sherman is transformed in the course of his persecution and his descent into
hell. Through his experience of shame and ignominious self-knowledge he
is transformed from a self-deluding narcissist to a courageous fighter for a
fair-go. By the time this satiric novel reaches its teasing conclusion, it has
an undeniable tragic dimension.
The genres in The Bonfire of the Vanities are therefore mixed. The
linear plot-development of Whodunit-suspense is mixed with the grotesque
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panorama of satire. And the main figure, with whom we can easily identify,
achieves tragic stature in an environment which combines farce and horror.
The Bonfire of the Vanities is entertaining pop culture which is also high
art with serious moral and spiritual dimensions.
A satirist launches his mockery of a society from a base-camp of
implied idealistic principles. These principles are not overtly present in a
novel in the sense that they are overtly present in a sermon. They are
present indirectly through their marked absence. That is, they are present as
the antitheses of the motivations of the novel's characters. If the characters
are motivated exclusively to achieve fame, luxury and illicit concupiscence
by deceit, treachery and pretentiousness, then we cannot help noticing the
total absence of truth, love, loyalty, honesty and justice. The Bonfire of the
Vanities is set in a hell superficially disguised as New York and hell is apopping in New York because these moral principles are totally absent.
The gallery of liars, cheats and vainglorious poseurs to whom we are
introduced as the populace of hell are convincing as real people and also
entertaining in their outrageousness. What is most noticeable is that each
character lives in almost hermetic isolation, totally preoccupied with selfpromotion and self-satisfaction. Social intercourse therefore consists of
uneasy alliances of individuals who temporarily have common goals and
angry conflicts between individuals with opposing goals. No individual
wins a superior overview of this jungle of conflicting appetites with the
exception of Wolfe's protagonist, Sherman McCoy. McCoy gains this
overview, this insight into the insanity of the New York jungle, only
towards the end of the novel. He becomes the eyes of Tom Wolfe himself as
he wakes up as a persecuted outsider hounded for different reasons by both
the rich and the poor. Ostracism and his tragic fall to penury and loneliness
teach him to see clearly. The blindfolds of narcissism and selfaggrandizement are removed and Sherman's insights arise from shame with
self and disgust with others.
Wolfe uses The Bonfire of the Vanities to expose the fragility of our
earthly daydreams of power, fame and love. He also exposes the
vulnerability of the privileged few who smugly feel that they are secure at
the top. The vanity of our ambitions is burnt to ashes in a bonfire that
garishly illuminates the scurrilous nature of most human interaction. The
Bonfire of the Vanities does for New York in the 1980s what Nathanael
West's Day of the Locust did for Los Angeles in the 1930s. Both cities are
presented as on the verge of frenzied self-destruction by hysterical mobs; Los
Angeles is consumed with a physical fire and New York is metaphorically
consumed with a moral bonfire.
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The climactic scene in The Bonfire of the Vanities is set in our
secular equivalent of hell. This scene occurs in a prison detention cell in the
Bronx and evokes loathing and horror through explicit gutter realism. This
gutter realism is so intense it becomes almost surreal. The cockroaches, the
vomit, the smeared faeces and the casually tortured mouse become the visual
representations of the degradation of the human soul.
Tom Wolfe's sybaritic New York depicts a new Babylon, a new
Sodom and Gomorrah, where the glamour and the luxury of the few in Wall
Street and Park Avenue are precariously purchased at the cost of the haired of
the black masses in the ghetto of the Bronx. It is symptomatic of Wolfe's
intentions that he parodistically heads one of his climactic chapters: The
Masque of the Red Death (p.370). For the novel's suspense is not restricted
to the question of whether the "innocent criminal", Sherman McCoy, will
be caught and incarcerated but is also omni-present as the question when the
dispossessed and disaffected Blacks and Puerto Ricans will rise up in their
fury and destroy New York in an orgy of envy.
The movement of the novel from farcical satire to grim satire with
tragic overtones is parallelled by developments in the characterisation of the
protagonist, Sherman McCoy. At first Wolfe creates a very unflattering
portrait of Sherman, showing him to be pompous and laughably
megalomaniacal. His daydream-image of himself and his fellow Wall Street
bond brokers as "Masters of the Universe" smacks of adolescent narcissism.
He is also lecherous, cowardly and deceitful in his adulterous affair with
Maria Ruskin. If anything, we are encouraged to feel antipathy and scorn for
Sherman at the beginning.
As the plot takes his fortunes on an irreversible downward spiral, all
caused by his one fatal blunder in not reporting his car accident, Sherman's
character and life philosophy are radically altered. As his luck runs out and
his wife, his mistress, his Wall Street friends and Park Avenue neighbours
desert him one by one, he changes from being a spoilt, vain fool into a
resourceful and resolute fighter for survival in the brutal jungle of New
York.
Oddly enough, this fall from grace caused by a flaw in judgement or
in character and this spiritual transformation of the hero through suffering
corresponds to some of the structural features of classical tragedy. We are
shattered by Sherman's shocking reversal of fortune, but we are in the end
inspired by the greatness of his fighting spirit. This is the tragic essence in
art.
But in order to be spiritually transformed Sherman is required to
experience the torments of hell and even a kind of spiritual death in the
prison cells in the Bronx. Having been utterly destroyed as a personality, he
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can commence the painful reconstruction of his self into a new man. There
is a touch of the Everyman tragedy to this process. Everyman has to learn
that he cannot take his wealth, prestige and his fairweather-friends with him
into the next world. The dross of the vain world is burnt off him. What
remains is the purified essence: a transfiguration of faith and good works.
Sherman's metamorphosis is of course not quite as idealistic as
Everyman's nor is it carried out according to the dogma of the Christian
religion. Nevertheless, there are parallels. Sherman is stripped of his wealth
and his property, his prestigious job, his so-called friends, his mistress, and
even his wife and child. Like Everyman, he is then freed to find his essence.
He does not turn to Christian humility and faith in the next life, however.
He doesn't even turn to pure, absolute truth, because he is obliged to tell a
small, technical lie in court which signals his rebirth as a fighter for
survival - a professional fulltime defender, as he terms himself.
The political, racist and mercenary forces arrayed against him are so
corrupt and so overwhelming that Sherman's invidious position reminds us
of the torture of Joseph K. in The Trial. Joseph K. is also torn from his
banal security and forced to spend his whole life in a vain attempt to prove
his innocence. Joseph K. is doomed to failure by Franz Kafka's gloomy
insistence that we are all morally and spiritually guilty and that there is no
adequate defence. Joseph K. submits meekly in the end to his execution as a
scapegoat for universal human guilt and sin.
Sherman McCoy, in his metamorphosed form atter his spiritual
"death", devotes his entire life as a professional defendant to proving his
relative innocence and to uttering the truth against overwhelming forces.
Because various classes in New York, for various reasons, are trying to
make a scapegoat out of Sherman in order to advance themselves politically,
we now begin to side with Sherman as the underdog.
Finally, in the epilogue, when Sherman raises his clenched fist in the
courtroom in a symbol of defiance and of his resolution never to stop
fighting, we feel that he is entitled to this histrionic gesture which is of
course also an ironic, self-conscious gesture to his estranged wife. It is a
gesture which is meant to remind us of the days of his relative innocence
when he had used the same gesture as an ironic sign of solidarity with his
then young wife, of his resistance to the corrupting force of Wall Street
materialism. The opening chapters of the novel, however, show how
miserably he failed to resist the temptations of this materialism.
Wolfe refuses to give us the sop of a so-called happy ending which
would show Sherman, in his new self, triumphant over the district attorney
and the various political pressure groups who have wilfully perverted the
course of justice. Instead, in the open ending of The Bonfire of the Vanities,
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Wolfe shows Sherman as triumphant over his former, corrupt self. It is no
longer his purpose to win this case and then return to his old way of life.
His old way of life is irrevocably destroyed. It is now his life's purpose to
fight for manly self-assertion, for apolitical fairness and for justice. This
goal may be untenable on earth in its pure form, but it is the fight to attain
it which has become a purpose in itself. Der Weg zaehlt, nicht die Herberge.
(It is the way that counts, not the destination.)
For satiric purposes and also doubtless for the purpose of
sensationalist entertainment, Wolfe has chosen to represent the racial and
economic problems of New York as a panic-stations crisis. The sense of
menace and impending doom in The Bonfire of the Vanities is evoked by
two narrative techniques. The first technique has to do with characterisation.
The second technique has to do with Wolfe's apocalyptic vision of New
York's socio-economic background.
All of the characters share a nervous, intense hunger for life. By life
they understand satisfying their passions for power, prestige and
conspicuous consumption. With a self-preoccupation that smacks of
infantile narcissism they hunger for TV acclamation of themselves as
"stars". If they are by chance already "stars", that is, famous, glamorous,
supemch etc, they hunger for the acclamation of other "stars" who are
afficionados of the latest, super-trendy, ultra-exclusive fashion in clothes,
interior decors or entertaining. Social intercourse in The Bonfire of the
Vanities is a ruthless competition of everyone trying to impress everyone
else. The purpose of life is to be the richest, the most powerful, the most
talked about and the most listened to person in New York.
Not only the rich compete for power and prestige. The black and the
Puerto Rican poor and unemployed of the Bronx show their hunger for
power by affecting "the pimp roll", by their anti-bourgeois clothing (which
is almost a fetishistic uniform), by violent and destructive petty crime, and
by using foul-mouthed speech-cliches which advertise their toughness. Their
self-respect is dependent on their ability to strike terror into the hearts of the
employed and the well-to-do in New York.
The middle class characters - the lawyers and the journalists - show
their hunger for prestige by yearning to be featured in the media for their
professional coups and then to be erotically worshipped by impressionable
young females. All classes therefore in this novel - the lowest, the middle
and the upper - strain with nervous passion for acclamation. There is not a
single character who is serene, self-contained or independent and not a single
character who has a loyal, mutually supportive friendship or relationship.
The media are the instruments of this hunger for public acclamation.
The media are also manipulated by policial power-brokers to broadcast lies
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and thus detennine the opinions and the prejudices of all classes and make or
break political careers. The media offer the characters in The Bonfire of the
Vanities a daily "fix" of titillation, scandal and evil. The sinister black
Reverend Bacon advances his version of the black revolution by expert
manipulation of the media-marionettes just as he exploits the white
establishment by cynical blackmail of their collective guilty consciences and
their fear of revolution.
It is this threat of revolution that dominates Wolfe's representation of
the socio-economic environment of New York city. Wolfe repeatedly
stresses how the forces of law and justice in the Bronx fear an uprising of
the disinherited and cower inside their court building with a siege-mentality.
There are satirical parallels between judges and district attorneys protecting
their cars in the Bronx with John Wayne protecting his waggon-txain against
the maraudering Red Indians in Western movies.
The main players in The Bonfire of the Vanities are male careerists.
The female players are either neglected wives or glittering sexual prizes for
successful careerists. The narrator divides the rich females into two groups:
"social x-rays" and "lemon tarts". The "social x-rays" have refused to accept
the role of neglected, inferior creatures and have forged a power basis of
snobbish in-groups. They devote their lives to exclusive private parties,
deliberately expensive fashions, charity committees, patronage of the arts
and gossip. The "lemon tarts" - who, to mix the metaphors, have "juicy
jugs and loamy loins" (p.72) - are the sexual playthings of the multidivorced heroes of high finance.
This is fine as a general framework for socio-sexual satire, but in fact
Wolfe's individual female characters remain pale and unconvincing. Even the
promiscuous femme fatale, Maria Ruskin, is little more than a plot device
with a Southern drawl. (Wolfe has an amusing technique for mocking the
warring socio-ethnic groups of New York by a phonetic satire on their
accents.) The next most prominent female, Shelley Thomas, is a boring wetdream whose entire character seems to consist of her brown lipstick. The
other main female character, Judy McCoy, occupies the moral high ground
in a condescending, frigid way. The dead boy's mother, Mrs Lamb, is given
a mater dolorosa image; her self-sacrificing life style may be morally
praiseworthy, but Wolfe is not able to give her any noticeable dramatic life.
It is only in his characterisation of the male figures that Wolfe is able
to create colour, excitement and intensity. This is so because he is interested
primarily in the farcical clashes of male will power in the public domain.
He has created a gallery of memorable characters in this domain. They are
not subtle characters and they have neither complex thoughts nor profound
emotions. But they do have colour and life within the restrictions of their
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one-dimensional portraits. There is that blackmailing rogue, Reverend
Bacon; the alcoholic gutter journalist, Peter Fallow; the crazy convert to
Islam, Herbcrt 92X; the "pimp-rolling", petty drug-dealer, Roland Auburn;
the pitifully posturing and timidly adulterous Larry Kramer; and the
diminutive but ferocious judge, the warrior of the Masada, Myron Kovitsky.
The main character, Sherman McCoy, is the only figure to escape
from satiric caricature into a new dimension with tragic reverberations.
Neither among the female nor among the male characters does there exist
any real friendship, any love or any loyalty. Life in The Bonfire of the
Vanities is war of all against all and when the devil does take the hindmost,
the victim is abandoned without a backward glance to his grotesque
persecution. Wolfe's novel is a satire (and a tragedy) on the human creation
of hell on earth by the perverse substitution of self for community, of media
lies for truth, and of power for love.
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