The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
Summary
Sherman McCoy, a wealthy Wall Street bond trader who privately calls himself a Master of the Universe, takes a wrong turn off a highway into the Bronx one night with his mistress Maria Ruskin in the passenger seat, and their car strikes a Black teenager named Henry Lamb, who is left badly injured on the roadside while Sherman and Maria drive away without reporting it. What might have stayed a private catastrophe becomes a citywide spectacle once a struggling British tabloid journalist named Peter Fallow gets hold of the story and turns Henry Lamb into a cause with the help of a publicity hungry Harlem activist, and an ambitious district attorney named Abe Weiss, sensing an opportunity with Bronx voters, pursues Sherman's prosecution as much for his own career as for justice. Maria, who was actually driving, cuts a deal with prosecutors and testifies against Sherman until a recording, captured by an illegal intercom in her borrowed apartment, exposes her grand jury testimony as tainted and the judge throws the case out. Weiss indicts him again, and that trial ends in a hung jury split visibly along racial lines. The epilogue, a newspaper article a year on, reports that Henry Lamb has died of his injuries, that Sherman awaits trial for vehicular manslaughter, and that a twelve million dollar civil judgment, his frozen assets and the end of his marriage have stripped him of nearly everything, including the entire self image the novel opens with, leaving him penniless and largely friendless in a city that has already moved on to its next scandal.
Wolfe writes in a dense, satirical, journalist's prose crowded with brand names, courtroom procedure, and the specific texture of 1980s New York class and racial tension, and the novel reads with real narrative drive even at its considerable length, its many overlapping schemers, lawyers, journalists, and politicians all pursuing their own advantage inside Sherman's collapse rather than any interest in the actual facts of what happened to Henry Lamb.
Historical Context & Significance
Farrar, Straus and Giroux published The Bonfire of the Vanities in October 1987 after Wolfe had already serialized an earlier version in Rolling Stone across twenty seven installments between 1984 and 1985, a format modeled deliberately on Dickens's own serialized novels; Wolfe rewrote the book substantially before hardcover publication, changing Sherman McCoy's profession from writer to bond trader after time spent observing traders at Salomon Brothers. The New York Times called it a big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs a reader by the lapels, while National Review compared its portrait of New York society to Edith Wharton's.
Brian De Palma's 1990 film adaptation, starring Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy, was both a critical and commercial failure widely seen as badly miscasting the story's satire, a disappointment that has not dimmed the novel's own reputation as one of the defining fictional portraits of New York in the 1980s.