“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.”
—Somerset Maugham
It is just possible that Tom Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, may be more important for extraliterary reasons than for purely literary ones. Of course, there are no purely literary reasons for anything, especially in the form of fiction, perhaps the most massive impure art form ever invented. But to say that this large but strangely slick hunk of a book may be important, almost as if on appearance, is simply to locate its possible significance in a brace of considerations: (1) as an occasion for stock-taking on the state of the American novel today; and (2) as a symptom of the cultural situation itself.
Roughly speaking, there are two obvious currents which flow in the mainstream of American fiction. One has to do with what we recognize as the imperishable works of our literature—in the great fictions, say, of Hawthorne, Melville, James, Edith Wharton, Willa Gather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow—while the other has to do with those strictly perishable and peripheral productions which in any period comprise the bulk of the best-seller listings. In the first instance, we have almost ceased to produce any fiction of major importance, and this for the shockingly simple reason that we have at the same time failed to produce a new generation of great readers. Today, indeed, the survivors in literacy must exert themselves to handle the works of John Jakes, Danielle Steele, and the rest. That’s where adult reading is today.
At this early point, it is difficult to go on without resorting to a basically subjective view and allowing scholarly objectivity to slide quietly into the dustbin. In the overview, I can see only one aspect in which Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities—a marvelous title, by the way—may be said to have any relationship at all to the novel of classical tradition. Certainly, it has no relationship to the great novels as far as thoughtful and reflective prose is concerned. There are no structural points of rest in Tom Wolfe’s self-devouring fiction, such as can be found, for example, in the famous trout-fishing scene from The Sun Also Rises. Everything is so full of hype and superficial effects that one might easily miss the way The Bonfire of the Vanities is likely to survive what remains of our rapidly diminishing century. It is a novel of New York City. The city is the hero, the heroine, the comic and tragic figure of it all. It is indeed the bonfire of our vanities. All flesh is grass and burns at last in the consuming fire of our vast inanities. The shocker is that Tom Wolfe doesn’t know it.
As for literary effects, The Bonfire of the Vanities has perhaps forever unfocused any image we may still have of Henry James’s New York as the prevailing and classical recreation of that particular time and place. The term “literary effects” has ironic relevance here insofar as this is the only level on which Tom Wolfe can compete with the one and only master of civilized prose we have produced on this continent and displaced to another. But if there is anything that Wolfe doesn’t want to know, it’s how to write a complex and Jamesian sentence. Again, he is the artist of the electronic impulse, our laureate of the age of television who has legitimized the tradition of trash. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe has achieved the apotheosis of glitz.
I feel that it has been necessary to say these things aside from any attempt to provide the reader with a summary of plot. The trouble is, the plot isn’t all that interesting. It is the author’s retelling of the myth of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf (if he’ll pardon the expression) let loose in New York City. Sherman McCoy is Little Red Riding Hood, a bungling innocent of an investment banker making about a million per year with the prestigious firm of Pierce & Pierce, who still allows himself to become hopelessly victimized by crime, the law, and social circumstance. A voracious and composite ethnic minority is the Big Bad Wolf that gobbles McCoy alive. The book is on fast-forward all the time, without any letup, so that characters and incidents flash by in a multiplicity of scenes that will no doubt become easily adapted to a TV mini-series or to movie screens in our cement block clinics across the land. All the characters—the dull but decorative wife, the seductive and obligatory mistress, cops and lawyers, high investors as well as the sleazy hustlers that infest the city at its lowest levels—are caricatures of types that the wellconditioned reader and potential viewer will recognize immediately and have no further need to relate to the untoward complexities of reality itself.
Tom Wolfe’s typographical tricks are all resplendently and tediously displayed: the onomatopoeic spellings, relentlessly supplied whether the reader requires them or not, and such homophonics as may even reduce the word “talk” to tawk. It is difficult not to wonder, momentarily, just how Mr. Wolfe would have us pronounce the word “talk,” if not tawk, or does he want the “I” pronounced, too, as in talc? Frankly, if more prudently edited on the side of bulk alone. The Bonfire of the Vanities would make the very zinger of a tape-recorded book. It fairly bristles with sound effects. But in the end, after all the hijinks have been duly performed and put to rest, this is an overlarge novel of very small consequence. It has all the substantiality of spun cotton candy for the junk-food addicts of the new illiteracy.
In an interview published in the Boston Globe (November 13, 1987), Tom Wolfe said something which may indicate why his first novel lacks any substance beyond its momentary glitter as an exciting media product. He said: “We’re now in a period of freedom from religion; we’ve long since gone through freedom of religion. The last freedom is to remove the internal shackles of ethics, morality, all those things. That’s been the great struggle of the last 20 years, and that struggle’s been largely successful.” This is a very curious statement for a novelist to make, I think, as it removes the main source of tension which the drama of human relationships irresistibly compels: I mean, of course, the moral dimension. The moderns have now displaced Cardinal John Henry Newman’s sensible dictum—that we cannot have a sinless literature in a sinful world—with the notion that a sinful world itself is an illusion of the ethicist. But if this is the case, who gives a damn about Sherman McCoy anyway?
[The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) $19.95]
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