Choose Strong
For Tim.
I brought with me on the two-week trip to Beijing "The Bonfire of the Vanities"
by Tom Wolfe, recommended online as one of the best set in NYC, and finished it
on the last day.
The story tells the spectacular downfall of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street bond
trader and Park Avenue resident, after his Mercedes roadster hit a black youth,
Henry Lamb, in the south Bronx. His golddigger mistress Maria Ruskin was driving
but the partial license number Lamb remembered led the police first to McCoy and
he ended up on the hook when multiple interests entered the fray as the events
unfolded. There were Reverend Bacon, the black demagogue Harlem minister
exploiting NYC's racial tensions, Abe Weiss, the district attorney seeking
reelection and fearing losing black votes, Lawrence Kramer, the insecure
assistant DA trying to impress his boss and a pretty juror, Peter Fallow, the
British newshound thrown a bone that could save his floundering career at The
City Light, and Tom Killian, the well-dressed sharp-shooting slum criminal
lawyer trying to make a buck. At the end, McCoy and Kramer were disgraced and
cut down to size--they paid for their lusts, Fallow, used by Bacon, won a
Pulitzer for exposing McCoy, the case was still a mess, the truth was no more
clear, justice looked unlikely, and meanwhile Henry Lamb was forgotten and had
died in hospital.
I set out to learn about NYC and its people and was not disappointed. The book
took me to affluent insulated Park Ave co-ops, Nickerboker parties, Wall St.
trading floors, an "Ant Colony" rental unit, slums and the court house in the
Bronx, etc. With keen cultrual observations, Wolfe painted vivid pictures on
Wasp, black, Irish, and Jewish characters on diverse social strata. Amid the
ironies and absurdities, I liked the minor characters such as John McCoy
(Sherman McCoy's father), Judge Kovitzky, and Detective Martin, and the ideas of
the "Favor Bank" and the Irish "Donkey loyalty."
Here's a paragraph on page 54 comparing the commute of the two McCoys:
It was a ten-dollar ride each morning, but what was that to a Master of the
Universe? Sherman's father had always taken the subway to Wall Street, even
when he was the chief executive officer of Dunning Sponget & Leach. Even
now, at the age of seventy-one, when he took his daily excursions to Dunning
Sponget to breathe the same air as his lawyer cronies for three or four
hours, he went by subway. It was a matter of principle. The more grim the
subways became, the more graffiti those people scrawled on the cars, the
more gold chains they snatched off girls' necks, the more old men they
mugged, the more women they pushed in front of the trains, the more
determined was John Campbell McCoy that they weren't going to drive him off
the New York City subways. But to the new breed, the young breed, the
masterful breed, Sherman's breed, there was no such principle. Insulation!
That was the ticket. That was the term Rawlie Thorpe used. "If you want to
live in New York," he once told Sherman, "you've got to insulate, insulate,
insulate," meaning insulate yourself from those people. The cynicism and
smugness of the idea struck Sherman as very au courant. If you could go
breezing down the FDR Drive in a taxi, they why file into the trenches of
the urban wars?
The title "The Bonfire of the Vanities", I've learned, was taken from the
historical event in 1497 when a Florentine Dominican friar burnt vanity objects
that distracted people from serving God. And there lied the figurative sense of
the tale, the purge of sin in a modern setting.
