bonfire of the vanities (tom wolfe)

Tom Wolfe’s novel was a key text for us back in the late eighties. It was both the zeitgeist novel and our zeitgeist novel, with its Dickensian portrayal of the Big Apple, the other York. At one point the novel even mentions Limelight, (given the article ‘the’ in front of it), visited by the degenerate British hack, Fallow. This article by Bruce Bawer says a lot of the things I might say here, acclaiming the novel as both influential and one of the few that has survived the test of the time from that epoch, another world, another New York. Wolfe’s tome was modelled on the great novels of the nineteenth century, initially serialised in Rolling Stone, before being reworked prior to its final publication. Even if the author was perhaps prone to caricature, he was still operating on a vast, challenging scale. Rereading the novel today, it feels as though it successfully captures that pre-Giuliani era of a city with sharp edges, which seemed headed for inevitable conflict and societal collapse. As Bawer notes, these things never took place, even though the culture wars that Wolfe denotes rage just as fiercely, if not more so, today. In a sense it might be that they have been subsumed by the third estate in the novel, the media, for whom these culture wars are grist to their mill. Wolfe’s novel might be said to flirt with Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle, where real political change is chewed up and spat out by the recurring requirements of the media machine. One aspect of this is the way in which the novel’s narrative remains unresolved at the end, even with a coda set a year later: as though the characters are caught in an endless media cycle. The greatest survivor of this New Yorican era is presumably Trump, who no matter what else he did, learnt to ride the back of the media tiger with aplomb and has used it to his advantage ever since.

Contemplating this world with hindsight, one can’t help thinking of all the elements of the city that Wolfe chose not to include. (Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Springsteen, Warhol, Basquiat, the New York Dolls, Jarmusch, Spike Lee etc) This more artistic, less polarised vision of the city doesn’t fit with the thesis of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Whilst the race wars and urban decay which the novel appears to predict have not quite come to pass over the following thirty years, what does seem to have remained constant is the culture war matrix which the book constructs. This matrix has shaped subsequent political and social development, with the alternatives from beyond the matrix pushed to the margin. In our era, you are either a so-called woke-ist or a preppy neo-capitalist. Anything else barely gets airtime. Wolfe understood this societal evolution all too well, and in this sense Bonfire of the Vanities is distressingly prophetic.