Fåfängans fyrverkeri (1987)

This book was 5/5 for giving a great description of a few specific parts of NYC life in the early 1980s, but 3/5 because the fundamental plot was gratingly boring. It's worth reading to get a feel for the environment, but would have been a lot more justifiable if it were 50-100 pages, not 500. While there was a bit of interesting psychological development of the main character (essentially, his decline from rich/successful and not caring about anything, to essentially a caged animal and street fighter), Wolfe doesn't actually show much about that -- it's very rushed and essentially entirely in the last chapter and epilogue. So ironically the book was too long to be worth reading, but also missed the most interesting part.

Unless you're really into this kind of literary fiction, or a huge fan of Tom Wolfe, I'd probably skip this. ( )

A remarkable adventure with a coy, dark undertone that is brilliantly worked in by Wolfe. This book is 1980s New York at its grittiest, touching on race, prejudice, and moral and mob justice. Some weaker writing is constantly saved by sharp humour, and the grand punchline is not to be missed. ( )

What an amazing book... NYC in the 1980s! The book takes you into the world of the privileged NYC upper crust. The collision of the privileged Sherman and the justice system and media is a timeless morality play. The book still resonates today. The issues are still relevant.
Pride, the deadly sin, also known as the "mother of all sins" is the main catalyst for all the problems that Sherman encounters, and it also leads to the downfall of Kramer and Fallow. The book brings you into the minds of these characters in intimate ways.
( )

I finished this last night, and I've been mulling it over all day. On the one hand, Wolfe is a talented writer, capable of creating vivid, visceral scenes. On the other hand, he relies on a lot of crutches, most notably the ellipsis-riddled paragraph to represent the frenzied thoughts of a person in panic.

Wolfe does a remarkable job of creating a bunch of horrible characters who we nonetheless end up having some positive feelings for at the end of the story. However, the reason we end up sympathetic toward the WASP protagonist at the end is the gross caricaturing of liberation theology and liberal activism on racial issues. The opening scene and the mirroring climax, involving black uprisings against perceived white injustice, evoke in the reader not sympathy or even understanding, but revulsion. This is the same feeling that Wolfe so savagely attacks in the rest of the book.

This mixed message results from Wolfe's refusal to pick one or two targets, instead choosing to attack everything: white fear, black radicalism, Wall St. greed, Ivy League (and all the institutions that feed the Ivy League) elitism, materialism, the obsession with image, the American lack of culture, European snobbishness, journalistic laziness and opportunism, the politics of victimhood, and America's vast reserves of inequality all meet Wolfe's acid pen. That's a lot for one book, and I think Wolfe would have been well-served to focus a little bit.

Aside from the lack of focus, a lot of Wolfe's criticisms seemed stale to me. That's completely unfair: it's not his fault I didn't read the book when it was fresh. It's not his fault I read American Psycho before Bonfire. It's not his fault I went to Hampshire. At the same time, if the novel is to be more than ephemeral, it must hold up to those of us who weren't reading novels in the mid-'80's. ( )

Wow.

This is clearly a top-notch book for its rabblerousing racial-hate mob-inducing polemics that plays to both conservatives and liberals at the same time while convincing me that everyone in New York City during the '80s is some of the most hateful, despicable politics-led morons on the planet. I hated the socialites and I hated the mob of the people led by the nose.

As a whole, this entire book can only be described as the enthusiastic stirring of a huge steaming pot of poo.

Satire? Oh, hell, I guess it is, just so long as us readers look at it like the over-the-top circus of buffoons that it is. Some great writing, of course. This is Tom Wolfe. But I'll ALWAYS love his nonfiction best.

So what's my problem? It's neither the all-out skewering of a wall-street idiot or outright caricatures of the media, judges, lawyers on both sides, or preachers. In fact, since this novel, I've read and watched enough lawyer shows, good ones, mind you, that this book seems rather paltry and lame.

But here's the kicker. This came out before OJ. It's almost like a silly premonition trying to put a rich entitled WASP on a pedestal even if he never gets out from under the heel of "justice". I'd have to make a pretty long case on this, but the outline is pretty clear. They were both farcical and absurd for the same reasons if not for the underlying causes. And yet, the causes are just a flip-side.

Public perception, racial politics, wagon-training justice, and people being people. Out for blood and damn reality. And you know what? I DIDN'T CARE FOR THE MAIN CHARACTERS AT ALL. None of them. Not sympathetic in the slightest. I wanted to see everyone burn. But they didn't.

Instead, we had a three-ring circus of a satire that doesn't go far enough and the subversively-angled conservative arguments playing out in this text are laughable. The liberal caricatures are even worse.

Reading both sides of this just makes me want to puke.

So? It's a modern novel holding a big stick and stirring a big pot of poo.

For some, maybe it's as entertaining as a car wreck. But not me. There are MANY better examples of satire that work so much better. ( )