the bonfire of the vanities by tom wolfe

They have different tastes and different idioms. Each side has little idea what the other does all day. The private elite are apolitical swing voters. The public elite tend to the liberal left. Donald Trump’s election campaign defined itself against free-traders in business but also against human rights lawyers and know-it-all celebrities, as if these fields were one.īy dint of my job at the Financial Times I meet people in each world, and they are different. When people use the E-word, they conflate the media, the arts, politics, academia, and high-minded areas of the law with entrepreneurs, investment bankers, and internationally mobile corporate professionals. “Elite” has become the profanity that “welfare” and “communist” were in previous years. But it is often lost in the negative obsession with the one percent, which has spread far beyond the rote Breitbart howls against globalists. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĮven as I spectate across an ocean, this American fault line is visible.

But they represent a real split among urbanites. In Wolfean style, each character is a crude cartoon of his tribe. By the end the Wall Street man is ruined and the journalist has both a Pulitzer Prize and an heiress wife. A car incident, with a black victim, entwines them. The story centers on a successful bond trader called Sherman McCoy and a jaded reporter, Peter Fallow, who needs a career-saver of a scoop. Bonfire can be seen as a book about two kinds of elite: the moneyed and the cultured. There are the obvious echoes-the besieged rich, racial panics-but also a theme that Wolfe may not have intended. Read now, however, the book has more to say about 2017 than anything written of late. Some American cognoscenti have since treated Wolfe as somehow suspect: a shock jock with a poet’s command of the language. Thirty years have passed since Tom Wolfe’s first novel imagined New York City as an opulent failed state, where millionaires are one wrong turn from barbarian mobs and race card players on the make.Ĭritics recognized the virtuosity of the prose and also, in the stereotypes and the gleeful trampling on taboos, an illiberal malice. It turned its 56-year-old author into an enfant terrible.

On top of its book sales, film adaptation, and third life as an opera, the Bonfire of the Vanities achieved a rare feat.

The bonfire of the vanities by tom wolfe