The Bonfire of the Vanities
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The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
Literature
James Mustich
Aug 3, 2018
What’s most impressive about Wolfe’s rollicking fictional tour of New York in the 1980s is its vigor. He depicts so many facets of the city’s life: Park Avenue and Wall Street and their social and financial scheming; inner city housing projects and their attendant miseries and machinations; the personal and political confusions of the criminal courts; the vapid, venal power of the media. Each slice of life is drawn and quartered with a wicked pen. Give Wolfe a shoe, an architectural detail, or a verbal inflection and he’ll turn it into a satiric weapon sharpened by insight. This is the novel as comic romp, riffing on observable reality with an intelligence that is both precise and completely over the top. There may be no psychological depth here, but that, in part, is the author’s very subject. His furiously paced, hilariously funny novel is an ideal witness to the sad comedy of a metropolis cowering behind the shattering glass of its glittering and glowering façades.
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Carol Ann Weaver
Dec 27, 2023
Wow!
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