The story of McCoy’s subsequent downfall is told alongside those of three other men, all characterised by their raging ambition and vanity: an alcoholic tabloid journalist desperate for a scoop a power-hungry pastor and a district attorney keen to impress one of his former jury members, the brown-lipsticked Miss Shelly Thomas. His mastery is punctured, however, when, with his mistress at the wheel, his Mercedes hits and fatally injures a young black man in the Bronx. Sherman McCoy, known to himself as a “Master of the Universe”, is a millionaire bond trader at Wall Street’s Pierce and Pierce, where the roar of the trading floor “resonate with his very gizzard”. In the outpouring of tributes following Tom Wolfe’s death, his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities proved to be his most celebrated and widely admired work. But the ability to “capture the decade” isn’t the only measure of a writer’s ability, and like a hot-pink puffball dress, this story displays a blithe disregard for nuance. S o regularly is Tom Wolfe’s brash 1987 tome described as “the quintessential novel of the 80s” that you almost feel the phrase could be slapped on as a subtitle.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |