Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Paperback, 690 pages, Pub October 30th 2001 by Dial Press Trade Paperback (first published November 1st 1987), Literary Awards: Ambassador Book Award for Fiction (1988), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Fiction (1987)

This novel doesn’t read now the way it did to me as a younger reader. Deeply explicatory of the ways people arrange their brains to suit the facts that show them in the best light, it is a cynical book but not a cruel one. This is the way people act, moral or not, so we’d best take that feature into account when facing criminal charges.

First published on a fortnightly basis as a 27-part serialization in Rolling Stone magazine in 1984, this first novel of Tom Wolfe was later published, with revisions, by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1987. With the book publication, Mr. Wolfe became a cause célèbre. He’d been disappointed with the reaction of the public to the magazine serialization and that earlier effort seems to have been almost lost to history:

From The Independent :

It felt all the more ironic given the book’s title. The first vanities bonfire happened in Florence, Italy in 1497 when supporters of friar Girolamo Savonarola publicly burned what they considered vain objects – books, art, music, anything deemed immoral. It’s easy to see Wolfe playing the part of Savonarola, eradicating all evidence of his early attempts at fiction.

A beautiful obituary of Wolfe in Rolling Stone magazine reminds us of Wolfe’s other work, highlighting the 2007 novel entitled, I Am Charlotte Simmons .

Considering Bonfire was Wolfe’s first novel, it was a marvel of description, capturing the technicolor of the Wall Street bond market, the holding pen in the Bronx Criminal Courts Building, as well as the well-padded offices of Reverend Bacon, the profitable nonprofit savant.

The language is the thing to enjoy here. Plot is not this book’s strong suit. I read with real admiration Wolfe’s description of a crime victim, shot dead in the back of a Cadillac: “The victim was a fat man with his hands on his legs, just above his knees, as if he were about to hitch up his pants to keep them from being stretched by his kneecaps.”

Somehow that description blew me away. The next sentence, how the rear window of the Cadillac looked like someone had thrown a pizza against it, confirmed that the victim himself had, in fact, been blown away.

Wolfe claimed in a couple places that there was truth in the saying that “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.” That’s his own ‘saying’ and the first time I read it I laughed. When I read it again, I wondered…I don’t think that is true anymore, fifty years later.

So, I am still scratching my head over the title. I am inclined to agree with another reader who has pointed out this is probably less of a bonfire of the vanities than a celebration of them, but perhaps the title refers to the main character, Sherman (Shuhmun) McCoy.

Sherman McCoy, whose name recalls the ‘real thing,’ is in fact, ‘the real McCoy’ insofar as he is a man untouched by human drama to this point in his life. Raised in wealth and working in bonds, he has hardly had occasion to consider what a ‘bump in the road’ might mean to the ordinary man on the street.

In the beginning, McCoy is fearful and respectful, still, of law enforcement and legal matters in general though gradually one can perceive his discernment increasing as time—and his opportunities for incarceration—go on. Perhaps the title is not meant as anything other than the notion that the innocence of man, in the larger and smaller senses, is set alight every day in urban America, were we only aware.



Tweet

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

Hardcover, 416 pages, Pub September 27th 2022 by Doubleday Books, ISBN13: 9780385547970

A Kate Atkinson novel is something to celebrate. Britain comes roaring through, “olden” culture perhaps more strongly than that of recent days. This novel is set in the 1920s, a time of great change after the Great War, and a time of gathering wealth…for a few.

The ‘culture’ I speak of that is unique to England is the strength, sophistication and, dare I say, deceptiveness of British women. I can assure you that while America has had strong female leaders, the only women approaching the personalities of everyday housewives Atkinson liberally sprinkles throughout her novels are pioneer women wielding long guns.

Atkinson does her time warp manner of writing again: she trained us all well in her earlier novels (e.g., Life After Life, A God in Ruins) to work through the confusion. All the time she is telling the tale, we are thinking she is misdirecting, forcing us to make connections, to solve a mystery we didn’t even know was a mystery. She must be happy she trained us so well.

It must be exquisitely difficult to write a novel expressing the viewpoints of so many characters and still write it all in a straightforward timeline. It can’t really be done, when you think about it. At some point the reader is going to have to retread some ground. In Shrines, the author doesn’t bother with your confusion: the reader is suffering the same confusion as one of the characters.

But what characters! So many, and so recognizable! The gruff nightclub owner Nellie and her passel of disappointing and dissolute children, the righteous police inspector, the criminal policeman looking for the last best chance, the savvy schoolgirl, the bright, capable and attractive spy. It is such a delicious stew that we don’t care how often she turns the tables on our understanding by introducing another piece of the jigsaw.

It doesn’t make for fast reading, I would say, but it does rather emphasize the pleasures of re-reading. Sometimes books are so good one would rather just wallow there for a week or so, being thrilled again and again with the club-owner’s strong-minded and (one imagines) strong-bodied son of a certain age: not so young as to be green but not so old as to be past falling hard in love.

It did occur to me that readers of Ms Atkinson’s novel must surely be mostly women. Surely the variety of unique women in this novel would overwhelm any man who this way wanders. Women, of course, are completely aware of the range of skills and talents of others of their sex, but those who still think of women as ‘the fairer sex’ may find themselves out of their depth.

This is definitely a mystery, but isn’t all of life? It begins with a mystery and ends with a different one. There are big questions and big surprises: we needed to be reminded, perhaps, that strong drugs were available since the 1800s for those who hungered for them. And those drugs wreaked havoc on societies before ours, in much a similar manner. Abortion was available, but not as safely as we have enjoyed in the past fifty years.

The novel is a triumph. It is a novel for adults—not in the sexual sense—but in the sense of reminding us of aftermath of world war, the horrors of the 1920s for those who had nothing but their passion, and the grotesqueries of those who had too much of everything except passion. And then there were the supposed ‘protectors’ who exploited and abused…these cannot be forgotten. Sometimes it roiled my stomach so, I had to put it aside…when reading of the young girl who wanted to go ‘on stage.’ So hopeful. God help us all.



Tweet

After the Ivory Tower Falls by Will Bunch

Hardcover, 320 pages, Pub Aug 2, 2022 by William Morrow & Company, ISBN 9780063076990

Of all the theories I’ve examined in the past several years that might explain the ghastly social and political division in our society, the one proposed by political commentator and opinion writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer Will Bunch was one I hadn’t considered. His thesis, the insistence that we all attend college at age 18 or our employment futures are doomed, is one he insists is wrong-headed. The fact that colleges have become profit centers for bankers should give all of us pause. The lack of financial assistance and the subsequent vast raft of unpaid college debt is surely a burden on us all.

After WWII, the GI Bill offered inexpensive educational opportunities for returning servicemen and was so popular that the federal government attempted to extend similar possibilities to the general population in conjunction with state schools.

As Bunch explains it, Ronald Reagan was one of the first to express disdain for the leftist student protesters in the 1960s that the country was basically funding to go to school since the Second World War. Reagan tried to impose tuition increases and reminded taxpayers that ought not “subsidize intellectual curiosity,” but should focus on workplace development, an attitude that entered Republican consciousness and traveled underground until we saw it rear its head in 21st C Wisconsin with the rise of Scott Walker.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker left college in his third year, he was so set on school being a road a to a job. Once he got a job, with the Red Cross, what need did he have of an education? [Many of us, looking at his career and justifications for policy set while he was governor, might have much to say on this subject.] His under-financing of state schools within Wisconsin since his ascension to the governorship had tremendous impact on staff and educators, to say nothing of students. To witness the impoverishment of a state, one need look no further. The rural folk complained about the clueless ‘educated,’ all the while the actual educated were leaving the state to its misery by getting jobs elsewhere.

“College started becoming more expensive and less accessible right at the very moment it became critical for getting a job,” writes Bunch. Funding for higher education fell routinely in the 1980s and continued that trajectory: “in 1980, a Pell Grant covered 75 percent of the cost of attending instate public university, but today it’s roughly 30 percent.” No longer was higher education considered ‘public good.’

Funding was withheld from colleges and universities so that the promise of advancement via a debt-free education crumbled. If education were no longer available to ordinary folks without extraordinary funds, they claimed to become centers for “meritocracy.” The deserving, whether exceptional in talent, brains, or need, became the focus of college admissions.

Those with lower incomes “couldn’t afford” school that didn’t promise immediate employment; those with slightly higher risk profiles but no more money entered the debt economy. The change in prospects for younger folks put increasing pressure on their parents to pay for educations whose costs increased annually while state funding decreased in direct proportion.

Bunch suggests the rise of radio was a contributing factor in exacerbating division in rural America. All-day national talk radio was some of the only programming rural folks in many states could access, broadband not being universally available in the countryside. Blanket broadcasting is still happening in Pennsylvania with its wide rural expanses and radio talk show hosts appear to be hyped-up evangelists for grievance about the college-educated.

By the mid-2000s the college dream of meritocracy and affordability had come apart. High-wealth individuals like Jared Kushner were entering the best universities (Harvard) without proven intellectual gifts. College was a business, a business the entire country was paying to keep afloat. Goldman Sacs was even purchasing student debt by the early 2010s, not unlike their willing exposure to sub-prime housing loans. This was the currency of our disablement, the scam of higher ed.

The collapse of trust in the basic agreement—I pay tuition and you give me a job—parallels the widening gap between college graduates and high-school graduates. Political attitudes appear to be defined in its greatest sense by whether or not one attended college or simply high school. Bunch, a father himself, finds the whole discussion about college costs absurd. How can 18-yr-olds ever get out from behind the debt? High school students are essentially blank slates who have little clue what the world offers. Bunch suggests that perhaps instead of paying their debt, we give them a chance to earn their way into college through national service.

It is a good idea, an idea whose time has come and gone and come again. The idea will probably be the source of much further division among political parties, but if there were people seriously thinking about how to go about it, I think it may be time to get it started. Perhaps the naysayers can keep their kids on the corporate track, if they want. The rest of us can give our high school leavers the chance to spend a little time learning about the world firsthand, earning a wage, learning how to work, figuring out what they don’t want to do while thinking about 1) how to negotiate a better deal, and 2) how to keep the world from coming apart at the seams. It wouldn’t be time wasted. Count me a supporter.



Tweet

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Hardcover, 416 pages Pub June 2022 by Viking, ISBN13: 9780399562969


Horse, the story of a great racing stallion from Kentucky named Lexington, encompasses an arc of American history that cuts still today. Australian author Geraldine Brooks puts her finger on the sensitive places in America’s living history which we as a society have not yet resolved: our relationship with America’s early racial legacy, slavery.

The colonial powers of the 18th- and 19th centuries all have complicated histories with race, but America stands apart as a country built explicitly on the notion of equality for all men. The founders just didn’t ‘cotton’ the connection properly between Blackness, economic prosperity, rights and freedom. The Civil War was meant to set them straight, but it didn’t actually do that. There was nothing civil about it…then or now.

The horse Lexington, described on two continents as the “greatest racing stallion in American turf history,” and slavery have a shared history, both in reality and in this fiction. There are pre-Civil War written and painted records of Lexington’s groom and trainer, both Black men in Kentucky, a state which would hover in-between the Union and Confederate armies and be bled by both.

We hear the story of a White Union soldier who initially finds himself seeking out prisoners “to better understand their minds.” Gradually, he realizes those men “were lost to a narrative untethered to anything he recognized as true.” Author Brooks connects our history with America today.

In a Brooks novel, readers enjoy the author’s passions…for history, science, horses, art…and for her native land, Australia. Brooks doesn’t give her own country a pass in the race relations area, giving voice to a critic of Canberra’s policies. She successfully details examples of microaggressions, some that go out into the world and are recognized for such, just as they land, by all witnesses.

The embarrassment of recognizing one’s own prejudices spills onto the reader, making us cautious but willing to learn more about how these impulses buried deep inside suddenly materialize and how they impact those around us. One of the more interesting characters who brings out the reader’s prejudices remains sketched only lightly in the background: a gruff woman of diminished means who throws out on the sidewalk an old and dirty painting of a horse and to whom we impute a nasty attitude totally dissimilar to our own good intentions.

Horse is a wonderful read, filled with surprising discoveries and twists we do not see coming. In the Afterword, Brooks reminds us that her husband, Tony Horwitz, was a Civil War historian who approved of her turn towards this history in her novel before his untimely and sudden death in 2019. What a wonder that this terrific book was birthed in midst of such great sorrow and loss.



Tweet

We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America by Jennifer M. Silva

Hardcover, 224 pages Pub Aug 1st 2019, Oxford University Press, ISBN13: 9780190888046

I don’t quite know what to make of this book. I read it because I now live in a state a large portion of whose population is deluged with far right TV and talk radio. A large number of people do not have broadband and therefore often do not know there are newspapers and TV stations which make an effort to substantiate news.

There is a disparity in information: the rural areas have been kept the equivalent of “barefoot and pregnant” by a state legislature that couldn't figure out how to fund failing schools and provide broadband.

This book is a study of Jennifer Silva’s time interviewing residents of a former coal town in Pennsylvania, finding out what their lives are like, how they see their personal and professional trajectories, and who they vote for and why.

Not being a social scientist, I found the stories Dr. Silva shares with us confounding. Maybe someone can come up with solutions for these folks, but the reason they don’t vote is that they basically don’t trust anyone after the life they’ve led. In one of the first couples described to us, Silva writes,

“They are not single-issue voters who prioritize social issues such as abortion or fund control over economic interests, not do they place themselves into clear-cut categories of Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. Most of the time, as they attempt to come to terms with their past traumas and future anxieties, they do not think about politics at all.”

Right. Silva’s mentor/thesis advisor might have anticipated this and suggested a less-stressed environment. If Silva was just wondering what was going on in towns like Coal Brook, I would understand that, too, but she admits she’d been hoping to find out what white rural conservatives were thinking about politics when she began.

Soon enough she found out her interviewees were unschooled and inarticulate on the subject of “politics.” She did hear, though, these white residents’ dissatisfaction with Black and Latin “newcomers” to the coal region, former city dwellers and immigrants. So she changed her focus a little to include the newcomers. That was smart, and refocused this work into something approaching Arlie Russell Hochschild’s award-winning Strangers in Their Own Land.

Maybe someone, after reading outcomes for poor white folks who grew up in an abandoned coal town or poor city dwellers who moved in to live inexpensively and get away from inner-city violence, will figure out a way to point these folks in a different direction, in the direction of a life that is more fulfilling and less crushing. But this is way outside my wheelhouse.

Tweet