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.



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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.



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