Friday, August 19, 2005

 

Review: Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Writing Style-6.8
Originality-7.9
Plot-8.2
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-7.2
Overall-7.7

This book starts out pretty slow. I was annoyed with the way Wolfe would write an action sentence to start each paragraph and then digress into some background story of the character’s. I thought that this would continue throughout the ~700 page book and that it would be pretty slow slogging through it. But, around page 200 this seems to stop.

There the pace quickens dramatically. And it’s an extremely compelling plot with great characters. I suppose setting up the scene and giving depth to the characters and their world is the point of the first 200 pages. But still, I think you can build depth more subtly and less annoyingly than he does it.

The main point though is that this turns out to be a great book. It’s about classism and race relations in New York, New York in the mid to late eighties at the height of Reaganomics and the New York crime wave.

The story goes: a wealthy Wall Street bond trader, named Sherman McCoy, and his mistress get lost one night driving through downtown in his Mercedes. They wander into the seedy part of Brooklyn that is filled with the downtrodden and minorities and are desperate to find their way back to Manhattan. They get increasingly scared. They come upon a couple of tires blocking the road, the man gets out of the car to move the tires and a couple of young black men approach him either to help or attack him. He assumes they are attacking him, throws a tire at them, the mistress gets behind the wheel and runs over the other one. They run off as fast as they can.

From here it progresses into a bit of a crime/court room type drama at times. Are they guilty of hit and run? What about the background of the two black men? Were they being robbed?

The trial becomes a huge media circus when a black, activist reverend takes up the cause to show that the New York legal system is corrupt and racist.

What is interesting is that though this is a book about racism and classism, it doesn’t revolve around the tragedy of the young black man who gets run over. You really feel for Sherman and feel as though he is a victim of this racially-charged, greed-induced atmosphere.

Overall, this is a great read. There is so much depth to the New York setting. Highly recommended. Don’t be thrown off by descriptions of this book as being about the upper class in 1980’s New York, that sounds kind of boring. It’s really a crime/court drama at heart, but with so much richness and so many great characters and such smart satire that it is really much, much more.

Comments:
Hmmm... This is interesting. My first instinct is to say, "Really? How can you be so sure?"

I obviously, from my review, think that the novel standing on its own (ie, knowing absolutely nothing about the author) is not overtly racist. I think it's satire. I think that up until the latter part of the book, Wolfe treats Sherman with as much ridicule as the reverend activist (can't remember his name). Sherman is a self-proclaimed "master of the universe", his wife makes fun of his job as a bond trader as people passing around a big peice of cake and collecting the crumbs that fall off in this process. I don't think there's any question that the societal elite are being mocked. The same way the black activism is mocked or the way that the newspaper man trying to write a sensational story and get the "scoop" is mocked or the way the defunct cops or the DA with political aspirations are being mocked. I think pretty much the whole community is being pooh-poohed. The way I read it was not so much that there was this white fortress of Manhattan being encroached upon by the black menace as much as how might this perception of a black menace (racism) ultimately effect in a negative way those persons who seem untouchable (the elite) by the woes of the lower castes. In other words, we all know that racism is bad for black people but how can racism have an effect on a rich white guy? How might classism ever have a negative impact on the upper class? At least that's what I took from it.

And it's probably important to point out as many know that I'm a liberal and I tend to read liberal books and I usually tend to assume that a highly acclaimed writer is pretty smart and therefore pretty liberal.

Now, I can totally understand the racism that you took from the book. Any time a white guy (not to mention a little southern-born socialite dressed in a white suit) writes about black rage its like walking on eggshells. So, to discuss this I think the authorial intent has to creep in. To what degree is Tom Wolfe racist? Did he really set-out to write about the black menace encroaching on his good times as you suggest?

To answer this question we need to know more about Tom. I googled him and found this interview to be pretty enlightening.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1340525,00.html

It seems to me that he is much like how Amy and I have described her brother, Mike, as being. Mike has lived in a college setting, Morgantown, WV, and Tampa, FL his whole life. These are two relatively liberal areas. Mike is quite the rebel so in these environments he has turned out conservative. We feel like if Mike spent a significant amount of time in Knoxville, for instance, his rebellious nature would make him into a liberal. I was reminded of this in the Wolfe interview when he says:

"Indeed, I was at a similar dinner, listening to the same conversation, and said: 'If all else fails, you can vote for Bush.' People looked at me as if I had just said: 'Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am a child molester.' I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind."

So, if, for example, he satirizes white liberal radicalism I don't think that it is as much racism as his nature of rebelling against his environment which is the New York literati.

Also, in this article he takes pride in writing novels where the reader would have difficulty determining if he was conservative or liberal.

[He is "proud", he says, "that I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books. My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer."]

So I also think that in Bonfire he is simply trying document the society. And I felt like it really had the ring of truth to it. Especially, when you compare it to the OJ Simpson trial and subsequent rioting. That trial could have easily been a similar novel. And I think that the entire world was saddened and sickened by everything involved in that trial and the society that produced such tensions as Wolfe is sickened by his vision of New York in Bonfire.

Another good article I came across:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/08/specials/wolfe-bronx.html

Note the quotes by Toni Morrison at the end. She lauds the book here and I consider her an expert on racism.
 
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
 
Crap, those links don't work when you read the comments with the little skinny column. If you go to the review page (Hit Bonfire under the "Book Reviews" links) then you can better read the comments and the entire links show up.
 
Alright, you've got me half convinced here. There's no question Wolfe is an asshole and doesn't seem to care about anybody or anything.

So, what you're saying is that we've all been duped? The national book award voters were duped, Rolling stone - duped, Tom Hanks and Brian De Palma - duped, NY Times book reviews - duped? That Wolfe is getting a big kick out of this novel making him a literary celebrity (I know he's got his detractors but still...) all the while he's laughing his ass off that he wrote this racist diatribe?

Obviously these people read the book the same way I did, as satire.

Well shit, I don't know. it's probably somewhere in between. I mean, he's probably a little racist but he gets by by playing it close to the vest and writing pretty entertaining stories.

I now have no desire to read A Man in Full.

If you feel this way about the book and Wolfe, why do you keep reading it? That's weird dude.
 
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