Crying Wolfe

SSSSSSSSSSsssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh......

The sound of pages turning, 659 leaves rustling. The 659 pages of Tom Wolfe's first novel. The Bonfire of the Vanities. Have to finish this chapter. The next. And then it explodes. Fingers are flying. A blur. The End of The Book.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

By Tom Wolfe

Farrar, Straus, Giroux

$19.95 659 PP.

TOM Wolfe is at his best as a writer whose task is to capture the sounds and superficial preoccupations of today's New York. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, he sets out to chronicle The City in its multi-colored glory; Wolfe's book has the novelistic ambition of a Dickens.

But the book, which is the first novel by the prolific creator of the New Journalism school of writing, is ultimately a story of character, not plot. While the scope of Bonfire is as disparate as the five boroughs, the themes are precise: personal ambition, egotism--Vanity.

Power and those it attracts are the subjects of Wolfe's novel. And Sherman McCoy is at the heart of it all--the axis of a limited world, the universe of social New York. The world where $1 million a year is barely enough income and the Co-op board has more control over your life than the police.

McCoy, as he reminds himself over and over, is The Master of the Universe. The top bond trader for a prestigious Wall Street firm, Sherman McCoy wears his invincibility in the form of cashmere overcoats and tailored suits. His Park Avenue apartment, and even his social-climbing wife, are all marks of his Master status.

To dominate at will is to be a Master of the Universe, according to Wolfe the pharse-maker. Masters of the Universe are the ultimate egotists, absorbed in the pursuit of a power that supercedes dollar values. In a way that differentiates him from his old-line WASP father, McCoy is a patrician with an all-consuming greed. Not merely to be rich, but to be the richest. The most. For as McCoy knows, it's not the money, but the control that he seeks on the trading floor, in his 20-room apartment, in the pied-a-terre of his mistress.

Yet power, as the truism goes, has its limits. In the concentric worlds that comprise modern New York, a character like Sherman McCoy is impotent should he venture beyond the insularity of chauffeur-driven cars and prepschool networks. Away from Wall Street, McCoy's life becomes the grist for other New York types, each one consumed by a drive for power. The gallery that Wolfe presents is compelling and yet predictable--his types are compiled from the people profiled in New York Magazine, Manhattan, Inc. and page six of the New York Post.

WOLFE presents these New Yorkers in their full, frightening shallowness. There is Peter Fallow, the British journalist/alcoholic in search of the big story that will pay for his drinking bouts. And Larry Kramer, the disillusioned Bronx assistant district attorney, hoping always for the big case that will earn him a promotion. And finally the Reverend Bacon, a Black Machiavelli who barters racial fury for craven ends.

But if Wolfe's choice of characters holds no surprises--although, to be fair, it is rare for any bestselling author to make these people his topic--for the reader, his execution is superb. Wolfe's journalistic style translates exceptionally well to the novelistic form. The story itself is punctuated with staccato syllables and stream of consciousness musings. Wolfe communicates with the reader on a sensory level that subsumes traditional language. The chapter called "The King of the Jungle," begins with this onomonopaeic passage:

"Thumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpat humpathumpa--the noise of the airliners taking off pounded so hard, he could feel it."

The dynamic language speeds the plot along, even as the story line itself falters. McCoy's story is a conventional tale in which few of the characters surprise. As the result of a freak hit-and-run accident in Bronx, McCoy becomes embroiled in the farcical, gargantuan appartus of the municipal court system. And just as McCoy used people in his life to serve his own egotistical ends, so he in turn becomes the vehicle for power that Wolfe's other characters seek. McCoy is a tweedy sacrificial lamb, ritually slayed in a public forum.

ALL the threads of the story come together at McCoy's trial--he is at once The Great White Defendant, The Big Story and The Political Boon. McCoy is dehumanized by the judicial process, and by the system that had served him so well before. He is thrown to a pack of hungry press animals, anxiously waiting in front of the precinct house to tear McCoy apart as he is arrested. The circus arrest is followed by the drama of a holding tank, complete with sinister Bronx criminal types, rats and other indignities to Sherman McCoy's person. By the time McCoy is arraigned, the Master of the Universe has become the scum of the earth.

Throughout the legal maneuverings and distorted press coverage, the McCoy trial rocks New York City as the racial incident of the decade. Of course, in the year Wolfe's book came out the city had at least two of those. Yet Wolfe's message remains clear--the public frenzy generated about the trial is the empty hysteria of an uncomprehending city. In a final touch of verisimilitude, Wolfe concludes his work with an old journalist-style fake New York Times article.

The complex characters that Wolfe so painstakingly describes are constricted by a system of emptiness and simplicity. The public life of a megalopolis like New York cannot do justice to the humanity of its constituents. The best and brightest, the Masters of the Universe, are gobbled up by the system and spit out in easily digestible tabloid form.

In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe is engaged in mythmaking; he considers the creation of a new set of legends to suit the multi-colored ethnic New York of today. But in the end, his myths are negations of the existing order. The only resolution possible is complete annihilation--the bonfire.

This message is a frightening one, challenging the security and morality of a way of life for nearly 8 million inhabitants. Sherman McCoy is no Ivan Boesky, but rather a complex and almost enduring character. He sees nothing wrong with his code of conduct, expects nothing less than perfect acceptance of the world. And that world explodes in his face--perishing in the flames the culture that produced Masters of the Universe and Masters of the Ghetto.