Author: Tom Wolfe
First Published: October 1987
Publisher: Picador
Genre: Fiction / Satire;

Apparently Tom Wolfe subscribes to the theory: “why say something in 100 pages when you can say it in 750”. As a result, his first novel, about class and privilege in New York, is a trying read.  

Wolfe became a legend in the 60’s, writing about the drug and free-love movements for various publications before publishing “American classic” non-fiction like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

In 1987 he published Bonfire of the Vanities, his first work of fiction in which he explores the differences in the classes of New York City through the disastrous story of Sherman McCoy.

Sherman is a high-flying Wall Street bonds trader with a twenty million dollar mortgage, a Mercedes Benz, a loving wife and daughter and a beautiful mistress. After picking up said mistress from the airport one night, Sherman takes a wrong turn and ends up in the Bronx, one of the Big Apple’s poorer districts, where their car gets stopped at a makeshift barricade and they are nearly robbed by a couple of black youths. They manage to escape without further apparent incident, but it turns out that one of the kids gets hit by the Mercedes on their speedy exit and winds up in a coma in hospital.

So, a huge race row ensues. It’s a mayoral election year and the Mayor happens to be unpopular with the black community, furthermore,  a Bronx community leader called Reverend Bacon takes issue with the incident and raises the local rabble into a fury.

While the book explores heavy contemporary issues of the US – race, poverty, trial-by-media, etc – the length of explanation and semi-repetitive background detail that Wolfe delivers us is a bit much. These are issues that I would imagine most Americans are reasonably familiar with (even in 1987), and so maybe sparing the extensive and often incomplete side-character stories would make it an easier read.

Sometimes when someone has been told they’re an "American literary icon" enough times, they tend to start writing like they actually believe it, as is the case here. I must say that I have never read any Tom Wolfe before, so I’ll have a crack at some of his earlier, non-fiction works before writing him off, but I would not recommend Bonfire of the Vanities to anyone as a starting point at this stage of the game.

Rating: 2½ out of 5