![]() His evocations of a wide variety of scenes, from the asphalt, concrete, and cinders strewn across the hills and dales of the southeast Bronx in a ghastly yellow gloaming to the bond-trading room of the investment firm of Pierce & Pierce on lower Wall Street, where young Ivy Leaguers roar like wild animals and by 8:30 A.M. ![]() His notations of different patterns of speech and habits of dress, of the latest fashions in food and interior decoration, and of the sorts of names favored by rock bands (the Pus Casserole) and political protest groups (the Gay Fist Strike Force) are hilariously acute. Wolfe’s dramatization of the tensions of life in New York City in the 1980’s is, to a degree, excruciatingly believable. ![]() A journalist first and last, Wolfe has scorned the solipsistic assumptions of most of his American fiction-writing contemporaries and-with etymological warrant-has grounded his novel in the news ( les nouvelles). What happens when one of the kings of the New Journalism, who throughout his career has employed fictional techniques in his reportage, decides to write a novel? In Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities we have an answer to that question. ![]()
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