A bite of the Big Apple

The Bonfire of the Vanities was written in the 1980s by the flamboyant, cream-suited, Tom Wolfe. Over the previous twenty years he had produced a series of linguistically wild, over-the-top, yet carefully researched books of reportage he called the “new journalism”. Remember “Las Vegas (What) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy)! Las Vegas!!!”?  And “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”? They don’t make titles like that any more. Even in New York.

The Bonfire was Wolfe’s first novel; a massive, sprawling, yet carefully crafted tale of the Big Apple half a century ago. That was when New York was, to use his own words, the bizarre, hilarious place where things are happening — the centre of the universe. He was consciously trying to write, if not the Great American Novel, then certainly the Great New York Novel. It was meant to be panoramic. All embracing. No shrinking violet, he compared his effort to those of earlier  “realist novelists” writing about their own cities; a conscious bow to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and to the works of Dickens. A touch of Zola and Dostoevsky.

The Big Apple is my kinda town. I have spent much of my life there. So, recently, as the Weinstein trial got under way and Epstein passed away, with sixty times billionaire, former mayor Michael Bloomberg limbering up for his run for the Presidency, I turned again to Bonfire to ask: How does the novel compare with today’s New York? And had Wolfe really got under the skin of the New York of the 80s?

So did he succeed? Well, up to a point. When I first read The Bonfire, thirty years ago, I was captivated, both by Wolfe’s rip-roaring prose, and by his page-turning tale of the decline and fall of young Sherman McCoy, the weedy but entitled, rich but insecure, Wall Street banker, who thought of himself as an untouchable Master of the Universe.

Sherman was accused of running down an apparently menacing black high school student while driving in the jungle — which was then the South Bronx. He was then slowly destroyed, in part by an unholy mix of his own cowardice and his desire to conceal what happened, because the truth would expose to his wife and employers, his affair with the young wife of an old, influential and vindictive billionaire.

But Sherman’s downfall was also brought about by the machinations of a corrupt black political hustler, the Reverend Bacon and by assorted white politicians, playing along with the Rev for votes. There are also sleazy lawyers, cynical cops and tabloid hacks who soup-up the sorry little tale and turn it into a phony people’s crusade against the rich and racist.

In addition, as a journalist, I marvelled at the years (yes, really, years) of meticulously detailed research Wolfe had put into his novel. There are accounts of everything from how to survive the race and class tensions on the New York subway, to everyday life in scruffy newsrooms and the great banks’ trading rooms. From how to go broke on $1 million (now perhaps $10 million) a year, to life in the squalid, corrupt city courts. And how to conform to the greedy, grovelling etiquette of ultra-fashionable restaurants. Do you continue serving, stepping over a major celebrity, dead on the floor, having just slumped down after stuffing himself with rare beef? And who picks up his tab?

As for the behaviour of Wolfe’s clashing New York “tribes”: WASPs like Sherman, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and black tribes, and finally the new “fourth wave” of immigrants (Hispanics, South Americans, Asians and assorted Middle Easterners), all with different codes of conduct, forms of corruption and ideas of honour — Wolfe caught their behaviour in anthropological detail. And, by golly, do those tribes tear into each other.

Our boy certainly did his homework.

Looking back, it is obvious that Wolfe was writing with great knowledge and authority, but only about limited parts of that New York scene. He utterly ignored some of the defining movements of 80s New York. Thus there is no recognition that New York was the centre of the contemporary art world. Sorry Andy. Sorry Jasper.

No mention of the great explosion of sexual freedom, or the notorious sex clubs, shamelessly attended by so many celebs, or the drug-driven rock ‘n’ roll culture. Only a brief dismissive glance at what was then called women’s lib. And no suggestion of the exploding gay scene. Or the massive impact on behaviour caused by an overwhelming fear of Aids.

Not a word either about the growing power of the black Muslims, except for a walk-on part for a comic hustler claiming in court to be a holy man from the Nation of Islam. (Of course global Islamist terrorism is a thing of the future.) Yes: racial politics is one of the central themes of the novel. But in Wolfe’s world, racial politics is, first and foremost, 1960s civil rights — black pressure and white guilt — turned sour, all seen from a white perspective. As for the new, fourth wave immigrants, today such an important political and social presence, they are pretty much a Greek chorus, shouting insults from the sidelines.

Worse still, to modern sensibilities: although the members of the various white “tribes” are all badly flawed, they are treated as complex, individual characters, warts and all, with a degree of sympathy and understanding. We come to comprehend why they are what they are. They are human beings. In sharp contrast, the blacks are not much more than one undifferentiated, unattractive mass, threatening the white status quo. The only individual black person is the Rev Bacon. And he is undiluted evil. You couldn’t get away with that today.

So Tom Wolfe’s “Great New York Novel” is not quite the panoramic work he aimed for. It is rather a glorious but partial, period piece. A bite of the Big Apple, but not the whole fruit. Yet it remains a humdinger. If you haven’t read it, do so.