|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Phoenix and the 'Bonfire': The Death and Transformation of Sherman McCoy
| Article
# : |
10554 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
5,614 Words |
| Author
: |
James Thompson
James Thompson, who lives in Nashville, is the author of
several books, the most recent of which is The Church, the
South and the Future. |
More success is inadequate for a back nowadays. To satisfy everyone involved--author, publisher, booksellers, readers--a book must be an event, preferably a big event on a scale that realizes a press agent's most fevered dreams. Judged by this standard, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities may have been the novel of the 1980s. Serialized in Rolling Stone to great éclat, the completed book appeared in late 1987 and quickly became the most talked-about work of fiction in years. Before the commotion abated, the book received a fresh jolt of publicity from the announcement that Hollywood would convert the story into what publicity floggers call a "major motion picture!" Although Brian De Palma's film flopped with the critics and died with a whimper in the theaters, its premiere attracted another wave of readers to the novel.
It is not hard to figure why the book seized the public's fancy, for it packed something for everyone into its pages. It sent New York high society into a tizzy, as normally unflappable arbiters of taste and style frantically tried to unveil the identities of Wolfe's thinly disguised characters. In less rarified New York circles, the novel caught on as a scathingly accurate depiction of the perils of surviving in the metropolis. Then, too, novel with lawyers as characters (the Bonfire of the vanities features several) find an abundance of avid readers among the most litigious people in the history of the human race. Some critics hailed Wolfe as a latter-day Dickens who had captured in vivid detail the tumultuous urban scene of the late twentieth century. Those of a more metaphysical bent discerned in Wolfe's South Bronx a new wasteland, an apt metaphor for the desolation that gnaws the heart of modern man. Wolfe's observations on black criminality provoked charges of racism--thereby firing controversy and guaranteeing even larger sales. Probably more than anything, the book owed its success to its timeliness. With the figure of Sherman McCoy, bond salesman extraordinaire, Wolfe dramatized the avarice and overweening ambition of the men who personified the freewheeling 1980s. It appeared that Sherman McCoy might join the ranks of such personages as Silas Lapham, Frank Cowperwood, and George Babbitt, fictional creations who burst from the pages of novels to plant themselves in popular consciousness.
A CONCERN WITH RELIGION AND MORALITY
Did the uproar over Wolfe's parade of rogues, fools miscreants, and poseurs obscure a key aspect of the book? It is not obvious that a concern with religion and morality informs the Bonfire of the vanities. Wolfe has never played the wrathful prophet, nor has he assumed
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
