THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES BY TOM WOLFE

BRIEF REVIEWS 2

Girolamo Savonarola was a florentine heretic, an ascetic monk who during Carnaval in February 1497 started doing these public burnings: bonfires of the vanities where he and his followers would heap sinsiren instruments of hoopla: makeup, wigs, lavish clothes, musical instruments, poems, paintings, all the luxurious trappings of Renaissance Italy leading the citizenry to ruin, and they would set them on fire, razing the ornaments getting in between them and God.

Remember it’s very easy now to laud all that sumptuous splendor but this was a culture blooming out of the cavernous fertilizer of woodwittled crosses, stonechurch austerity, still adjusting to the riffraff mediating their experience of the divine!

When Martin Luther visited Rome in 1510, his surly ass was aghast!

All is vanity Ecclesiastes tells us: hevel: vapor…smoke… futile ephemera that we put our faith in to to distract us from God.

In May 1498 the florentine powers-that-be had their own bonfire of the vanities!

They burned the hanged body of Girolamo Savonarola on the same spot where he performed his expurgations.

The nothero of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities Sheldon McCoy’s life is subsumed by vanity! He’s a bond salesman at Pierce & Pierce making about 1 million dollars a year. That may sounds like a lot but,

The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million dollar loan he had taken out to buy the apartment. What was $21,000 a month to someone who was making a million a year? That was the way he had thought about it at the time—and in fact, it was merely a crushing, grinding burden — that was all! It came to $252,000 a year, none of it deductible, because it was a personal loan, not a mortgage. (The cooperative boards in Good Park Avenue Buildings like his didn’t allow you to take a mortgage out on your apartment.) So considering the taxes, it required $420,000 to pay the $252,000. Of the $560,000 of his remaining income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fees; $116,000 for the house on Old Drover’s Morning Lane in Southampton ($84,000 for mortgage payment and interest, $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance, and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes). Entertaining at home and at restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent; for example, Campbell’s birthday party in Southampton had had only one carnival ride (plus, of course, the obligatory ponies and the magician) and had cost less than $4,000. The Taliaferro School, including the bus service, cost $9,400 for the year. The tab for furniture and clothes had come to about $65,000; and there was little hope of reducing that, since Judy was, after all, a decorator and had to keep things up to par. The servants (Bonita, Miss Lyons, Lucille, the cleaning woman, and Hobie the handyman in Southampton) came to $62,000 a year. That left only $226, 200 or $18,850 a month…

This is Wolfe at his most brilliant: giving an entire monetary taxonomy of a character. And some of those self-justifications are hilarious: “it was merely a crushing and grinding burden”.

The 1980s New York City of Tom Wolfe is a maelstrom of wealthlust, a crabbarrel of people clawing and yanking, vying for status. If you got something good, someone else wants it. Every single character oozes cupidity; there’s not a single ununctious wellmeaner in the whole book.

The plot kicks off when Sheldon McCoy is going to pick up his mistress, the beautiful young southern Maria Ruskin (she’s young! she’s buxom!), at LaGuardia and as he’s driving back into Manhattan he is euphoric,

There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening—and he was among the victors! He lived on Park Avenue, the street of dreams! He worked Wall Street, fifty floors up, for the legendary Pierce & Pierce, overlooking the world! He was at the wheel of a $48,000 roadster with one of the most beautiful women in New York beside him! A frisky young animal! He was of that breed whose natural destiny it was… to have what they wanted!

(Yes, Wolfe uses more exclamation points than any other writer I’ve ever read. And there was a Big White Fight at the turn of the century: Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving were all trying to shit on Wolfe for not writing literature, just entertainment. [None of those guys are exactly Joyce themselves.] But I think Wolfe is a propulsive writer who is fun & interested in the nuances of dialogue. And sometimes he’ll have a nice turn of phrase.

The Old White Triumvirate was mad because Wolfe was doing Big Numbers!)

Anyway, Sheldon McCoy, distracted by his rapture, misses his turn and ends up in the buh-buh-buh-buh-BRONX! and his car gets stopped and he gets into an altercation with two black teenagers and long story short, Maria takes the wheel, drives off, and accidentally hits one of them, and when Sheldon suggests they should report what happens, she talks him out of it to the gist of black lives don’t matter.

What happens is that the kid tells his mom that a Mercedes clipped him, and he ends up in a coma. His mom knows the rabblerousing bigwhig in Harlem, Reverend Bacon, and he whips up a frenzy that makes the hit-and-run the biggest story in the city. And when they find out that the driver of the car is a Park Avenue Rich Guy, Sheldon McCoy becomes the most loathsome man in New York and his life falls apart.

Tom Wolfe paints a large canvas of lawyers, financiers, and members of the press. Every character we meet moves the plot forward brilliantly which makes it easy to rip thru the 685 pages.

Sheldon McCoy’s foil is the assistant D.A. Larry Kramer who unfortunately wants the exact same things Sheldon wants: money, fame, pussy, —but his route has left him an underpaid government employee so he wants to stick it to McCoy in the spirit of resentment.

Larry Kramer becomes a comical buffoon: he’s obsessed with and always flexing his “sternocleidomastoid muscles”, the muscles in his neck, which he thinks is super sexy but every other character thinks is repulsive.

Essentially, this is a story about race strife. And we get the white side of the story. Obviously we’re meant to read characters’ racist thoughts as racist and bad, but Wolfe is not interested in the interiority of the droves of “blacks and latinos” he is always mentioning. Though he is interested in the variations of black speech, as John Updike positively says in a review of Wolfe’s second novel,

the confident rhythms of a slick clergyman, the irony-layered banter of two ambitious college educated “brothers,” the self-protective deference of an anachronistic Uncle Tom, the sullen non-compliance of a ghetto-bred “homey”

(That was in the New Yorker!!)

And the fixation on sneakers! It seems like Wolfe is having trouble coming to grips with the way big sneakers have taken the world by storm.

But he does have an acute eye to what seems like a distant world of white difference: the Irish, Italians, Jews, and WASPs are like different species, and if they can’t get along, what hope is there for the rest of the races?

There are some very funny scenes in this book though.

There’s an alcoholic british journalist, Peter Fallow who whenever we encounter him he is emerging out of a brutal hangover.

He’s the one that breaks the McCoy story, and one day he’s out to dinner with Arthur Ruskin, the geriatric husband of McCoy’s mistress Maria, and after he tells a crazy story about how he made his fortune, by chartering planes for Muslims going to Mecca… he literally dies.

And Fallow, the cheap mooch, finishes his meal thinking there’s no way they’ll make him pay for it.

“You ordered dinner monsieur, and it was prepared and served. We are very sorry about your friend’s misfortune…” then he shrugged and tucked his chin down and pulled a face. (But it has nothing to do with us, and life goes on, and we must be making a living all the same.)

Fallow was shocked at the crassness of the demand. Far more shocking however, was the thought of having to pay a check in a restaurant like this.

I enjoyed this book for its virtues. For me, though, there are two better New York books about finance and law: J R by William Gaddis and A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava. Both those books are just as propulsive, but much more innovative and humanely expansive.

But The Bonfire of the Vanities is a good book.

At the end, we never see Sheldon get convicted. They have to throw out the first indictment over some legal stuff and a melee breaks out in the courtroom and Sheldon punches a big black dude and knocks him down and just about has an orgasm,

Sank to the floor. Doubled up. The earring dangled. Now! —and I triumphed. He’s consumed by cold fear—they’ll get me—and soaring anticipation. Again! I want to do it again!

It seems to me like this is supposed to be the moment where Sheldon McCoy, all the vanities burnt away, finally has an experience of divinity.

But there’s no transcendence there, he’s just trading the guises of his vanity for more conspicuously brutal ones.

The problem with the bonfire of the vanities is that we’ll never be able to burn away everything that leads us to sin.