Unbelievably, Bonfire of the Vanities is my last book on my adult fiction shelf. I have been working on “this shelf” since April 9, 2007 – when I started off with Hitchhiker’s Guide. April 9, 2007! What – am I nuts? Where the hell did the time go?? And now I’ve gone through the alphabet and I am at the last book of this particular “genre”. Which shelf will we go to next? Will it be memoir? Poetry? Biography? Literary analysis? Acting textbooks? Wouldn’t you like to know.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
It’s a rare book that is an event. I remember when Bonfire of the Vanities came out – I remember reading it with my boyfriend, neck and neck. I remember everyone – EVERYONE – talking about it. It was a zeitgeist moment. A truth-telling bolt from the heavens, truths lots of people didn’t want to hear. It purported to tell us what was happening as it was happening. Lots of books try to do this, and some books do do this but don’t turn the book into an event. Bonfire of the Vanities hit the sweet (tender, angry, sensitive, paranoid) spot of the 1980s rise of “political correctness”. To be honest, Bonfire of the Vanities is not really my cup of tea, in terms of fiction. But at the time of its release, personal preference is irrelevant. I had to read it.
New York City has always been in my life. I have always known people who lived here, and as a kid would take trips down to visit my aunt, who was an actress. New York in the late 70s/early 80s was not the mall-ed out Disneyfied New York you see now, there to make tourists feel comfortable. New York was the wild west. The subways were covered in graffiti, giving them a violent anarchic look – but beautiful, too. People jumped the turnstiles all around you. If you were in New York in the 70s, then you know this is true, you know how widespread it was. If you followed the rules and DIDN’T jump the turnstiles, it was only because you were determined to maintain your OWN sense of morality, in the midst of a crime-ridden atmosphere. 8th Avenue was lined with peep shows and hookers and live go-go dancers working their way through college. When I moved to New York, 42nd Street was still in the grip of that past. The Lion King hadn’t moved in yet (although it was about to). In 1995, the buildings were boarded up, because the peep shows were already being zoned out of the neighborhood. Nothing had come in to replace them yet. So 42nd Street – a major tourist attraction – looked like a deserted movie set on some dusty backlot. Imagine that. I try to imagine the throngs of tourists on 42nd Street today, going into the Applebee’s (gross), or the Chevy’s (gross) … I try to imagine them dealing with the urban desolation which had no interest whatsoever in making THEM feel comfortable. (Thank God I was able to capture the last gasp of it before it was torn down).
The Bonfire of the Vanities is not so much about the New York of the 70s, but the New York of the flush materialistic 80s. HOWEVER: the fringes of the 70s still existed. In the 70s, everyone was broke. In the 80s came the “yuppies”, and new mone, but 8th Avenue remained the same (and the folks on 8th Avenue probably made a nice buck too, because people had MORE money to spend on sex). So there was this weird gap – and if you were in New York in the 80s, you’ll know how strange it felt, even if you were not explicitly participating in it. Then the bubble burst. And it was a huge bubble, way too huge to last. The Central Park jogger incident happened in 1989, 2 years after Wolfe’s book came out. New York “seemed” safe (although it never seemed safe to me as a kid, still doesn’t) but it “seemed” safe to those who didn’t know better. It “seemed” safe because Wall Street was doing great, and MBAs from around the country were now flocking there, fresh-faced and full of entitlement. The Central Park jogger case was the end-moment of that Zeitgeist (and the beginning of another). Wolfe was writing about the mid-80s, the insanity of a world living in a grand delusion, the gap between the Sherman McCoys and the folks hanging around the courtroom in the Bronx. In some cities, the segregation (not racial, but economic, although the two are sometimes related) is so strong that sometimes you may wonder, “Where the hell are all the poor people?” In New York, you always knew where they were.
I haven’t read this book since it first came out. I have no desire to. I like Tom Wolfe’s journalism better than his fiction.
EXCERPT FROM The Bonfire of the Vanities
Kramer and Andriutti were of the new generation, in which the terms triceps, deltoids, latissima dorsae, and pectoralis major were better known than the names of the major planets. Andriutti rubbed his triceps a hundred and twenty times a day, on the average.
Still rubbing them, Andriutti looked at Kramer as he walked in and said: “Jesus Christ, here comes the bag lady. What the hell is this fucking A&P bag, Larry? You been coming in here with this fucking bag every day this week.” Then he turned to Jimmy Caughey and said, “Looks like a fucking bag lady.”
Caughey was also a jock, but more the Triathlon type, with a narrow face and a long chin. He just smiled at Kramer, as much as to say, “Well, what do you say to that?”
Kramer said, “Your arm itch, Ray?” Then he looked at Caughey and said, “Ray’s got this fucking allergy. It’s called weight lifter’s disease.” Then he turned back to Andriutti. “Itches like a sonofabitch, don’t it?”
Andriutti let his hand drop off his triceps. “And what are these jogging shoes?” he said to Kramer. “Looks like those girls walking to work at Merrill Lynch. All dressed up, and they got these fucking rubber gunboats on their feet.”
“What the hell is in that bag?” said Caughey.
“My high heels,” said Kramer. He took off his jacket and jammed it down, give-a-shit, on a coatrack hook in the accepted fashion and pulled down his necktie and unbuttoned his shirt and sat down in his swivel chair and opened up the shopping bag and fished out his Johnston & Murphy brown leather shoes and started taking off his Nikes.
“Jimmy,” Andriutti said to Caughey, “did you know that Jewish guys – Larry, I don’t want you to take this personally – did you know that Jewish guys, even if they’re real stand-up guys, all have one faggot gene? That’s a well-known fact. They can’t stand going out in the rain without an umbrella or they have all this modern shit in their apartment or they don’t like to go hunting or they’re for the fucking nuclear freeze and affirmative action or they wear jogging shoes to work or some goddamn thing. You know?”
“Gee,” said Kramer, “I don’t know why you thought I’d take it personally.”
“Come on, Larry,” said Andriutti, “tell the truth. Deep down, don’t you wish you were Italian or Irish?”
“Yeah,” said Kramer, “that way I wouldn’t know what the fuck was going on in this fucking place.”
Caughey started laughing. “Well, don’t let Ahab see those shoes, Larry. He’ll have Jeanette issue a fucking memorandum.”
“No, he’ll call a fucking press conference,” said Andriutti.
“That’s always a safe fucking bet.”
And so another fucking day in the fucking Homicide Bureau of the Bronx Fucking District Attorney’s Office was off to a fucking start.
An assistant D.A. in Major Offenses had started calling Abe Weiss “Captain Ahab”, and now they all did. Weiss was notorious in his obsession for publicity, even among a breed, the district attorney, that was publicity-mad by nature. Unlike the greaet D.A.s of yore, such as Frank Hogan, Burt Roberts, or Mario Merola, Weiss never went near a courtroom. He didn’t have time. There were only so many hours in the day for him to stay in touch with Channels 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 11 and the New York Daily News, the Post, The City Lights, and the Times.
Jimmy Caughey said, “I was just in seeing the captain. You shoulda–”
“You were? What for?” asked Kramer with just a shade too much curiosity and incipient envy in his voice.
“Me and Bernie,” said Caughey. “He wanted to know about the Moore case.”
“Any good?”
“Piece a shit,” said Caughey. “This fucking guy Moore, he has a big house in Riverdale, and his wife’s mother lives there with ’em, and she’s been giving him a hard time for about thirty-seven fucking years, right? So this guy, he loses his job. He’s working for one a these reinsurance companies, and he’s making $200,000 or $300,000 a year, and now he’s out a work for eight or nine months, and nobody’ll hire him, and he don’t know what the hell to do, right? So one day he’s puttering around out in the garden, and the mother-in-law comes out and says, ‘Well, water seeks its own level.’ That’s a verbatim quote. ‘Water seeks its own level. You oughta get a job as a gardener.’ So this guy, he’s out of his fucking mind, he’s so mad. He goes in and tells his wife, ‘I’ve had it with your mother. I’m gonna get my shotgun and scare her.’ So he goes up to his bedroom, where he keeps this 12-gauge shotgun, and he comes downstairs and heads for the mother-in-law, and he’s gonna scare the shit out of her, and he said, ‘Okay, Gladys,’ and he trips on the rug, and the gun goes off and kills her, and – ba-bing! – Murder Two.”
“Why was Weiss interested?”
“Well, the guy’s white, he’s got some money, he lives in a big house in Riverdale. It looks at first like maybe he’s gonna fake an accidental shooting.”
“Is that possible?”
“Naw. Fucking guy’s one a my boys. He’s your basic Irish who made good, but he’s still a Harp. He’s drowning in remorse. You’d think he’d shot his own mother, he feels so fucking guilty. Right now he’d confess to anything. Bernie could sit him in front of the videocamera and clean up every homicide in the Bronx for the past five years. Naw, it’s a piece of shit, but it looked good at first.”
Kramer and Andriutti contemplated this piece a shit without needing any amplification. Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx, from the youngest Italian just out of St. John’s Law School to the oldest Irish bureau chief, who would be somebody like Bernie Fitzgibbon, who was forty-two, shared Captain Ahab’s mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, “What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail.” Kramer had been raised as a liberal. In Jewish families like his, liberalism came with the Similac and the Mott’s apple juice and the Instamatic and Daddy’s grins in the evening. And even the Italians, like Ray Andriutti, and the Irish, like Jimmy Caughey, who were not exactly burdened with liberalism by their parents, couldn’t help but be affected by the mental atmosphere of the law schools, where, for one thing, there were so many Jewish faculty members. By the time you finished law school in the New York area, it was, well … impolite! … on the ordinary social level … to go around making jokes about the yoms. It wasn’t that it was morally wrong … It was that it was in bad taste. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins.
Not that they weren’t guilty. One thing Kramer had learned within two weeks as an assistant D.A. in the Bronx was that 95 percent of the defendants who got as far as the indictment stage, perhaps 98 percent, were truly guilty. The caseload was so overwhelming, you didn’t waste time trying to bring the marginal cases forward, unless the press was on your back. They hauled in guilt by the ton, those blue-and-orange vans out there on Walton Avenue. But the poor bastards behind the wire mesh barely deserved the term criminal, if by criminal you had in mind the romantic notion of someone who has a goal and seeks to achieve it through some desperate way outside the law. No, they were simpleminded incompetents, most of them, and they did unbelievably stupid, vile things.
Kramer looked at Andriutti and Caughey, sitting there with their mighty thighs akimbo. He felt superior to them. He was a graduate of the Columbia Law School, and they were both graduates of St. John’s, widely known as the law school for the also-rans of college academic competition. And he was Jewish. Very early in life he had picked up the knowledge that the Italians and the Irish were animals. The Italians were pigs, and the Irish were mules or goats. He couldn’t remember if his parents had actually used any such terms or not, but they got the idea across very closely. To his parents, New York City – New York? hell, the whole U.S., the whole world! – was a drama called The Jews Confront the Goyim, and the goyim were animals. And so what was he doing here with these animals? A Jew in the Homicide Bureau was a rare thing. The Homicide Bureau was the elite corps of the District Attorney’s Office, the D.A.’s Marines, because homicide was the most serious of all crimes. An assistant D.A. in Homicide had to be able to go out on the street to the crime scenes at all hours, night and day, and be a real commando and rub shoulders with the police and know how to confront defendants and witnesses and intimidate them when the time came, and these were likely to be the lowest, grimmest, scurviest defendants and witnesses in the history of criminal justice. For fifty years, at least, maybe longer, Homicide had been an Irish enclave, although recently the Italians had made their way into it. The Irish had given Homicide their stamp. The Irish were stone courageous. Even when it was insane not to, they never stepped back. Andriutti had been right, or half right. Kramer didn’t want to be Italian, but he did want to be Irish, and so did Ray Andriutti, the dumb fuck. Yes, they were animals! The goyim were animals, and Kramer was proud to be among the animals in the Homicide Bureau.
I started this one once, but didn’t have time to finish it. I really enjoyed The Right Stuff and From Bauhaus to Your House, though.
Ken – I think The Right Stuff is my favorite of his – I love that book!
I was not homeless, I was just “struggling.”
Seriously, I remember when this came out. As you say, everyone was reading it–even those who weren’t regular readers. I was never that fond of the book, but, like you, felt compelled to read it just to join the discussion.
I had to stop reading this book. It STRESSED ME OUT. I always assumed I’d go back to it someday but something in the intervening years turned me off about Wolfe and I can’t seem to pick up any of his stuff.
There is some sort of awesome irony about this particular book being turned into such a disastrous Hollywood movie…the WAY they messed it up almost perfectly encapsulates the themes of the book!
Bren – hahahaha you are TOTALLY right. The forces of political correctness strangling the movie – well, lots of things strangled the movie – but the Morgan Freeman debacle was really the symbol of it all.
Bren – dumb question, but have you read Devil’s Candy? One of the best “making of” books I have ever read.
DBW – that was you???
You douchebag!
never read ‘devil’s candy’.
i think DBW flashed me a couple of times as well.
Bren – it’s SUCH a good book about why that movie went so so wrong.
I understand Mr. Wolfe has a new novel in the works which is supposed to come out some time next year. Can’t wait! Have you tried his A Man In Full? Of all the Wolfe novels I’ve read, I think that one and TBOTV are his best.
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