The Bonfire of the Vanities:

...Remember who you are," his justifiably aggrieved wife scolds him...

...This unsentimental report on New York City's ethnic and racial warfare, so eerily echoed in today's headlines, could be wound much tighter...

...Families, homes, children, the great chain of being, the eternal tide of chromosomes mean nothing to them any longer . . . they whirl about one another, endlessly, particles in a doomed atom...

...a respecter only of performance," the quintessential Me Generation achiever...

...McCoy and his fellow plutocrats disdain tradi...

...and certain oblivion, and it isn't his aristocratic pedigree, his Yale chin, or his million-dollar income...

...The disintegration of the self, of which Poe prophetically wrote, is the horror painted in lurid colors across Bonfire's huge canvas...

...He was a fucking reign of terror...

...He's "a Wall Street egalitarian...

...As McCoy explains to Killian, "All these people . . . it's all a thread, Tommy, all these ties that make up your life, and when it breaks '. . . that's it...

...Indeed, in THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $19.95, 659 pp...

...Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries...

...Morally, the barbarism of the tenements and jails is the obverse of the social barbarism practiced by the wealthy and so deftly lampooned throughout this novel...

...McCoy's arrogance, his elitist assumptions, and narrow but towering ambition are readily established...

...But true...

...McCoy must press "the pants of his two-thousand-dollar Savile Row suit [against] the bare toilet seat, his New & Lingwood cap-toed shoes . . . against the china toilet bowl'' when reading of his impending doom...

...Martin's) eyes would make the boy sense Irish Cop Who Don't Back Off...

...That soullessness is the vanity threatening to consume everything in Bonfire...

...Wolfe, papa of New Journalism, author of The Right Stuff, the sociologist who labeled the 1970s "The Me Generation, '' and the venomous ventriloquist of Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, crams a lifetime of unblinking social observation into The Bonfire of the Vanities...

...And while there is in these pages blarney aplenty - what Irishman won't be gratified as well as astonished to come upon a kind of word for "Irish machismo" at this late date - Wolfe has also given his story a portentousness that would make the master of American Gothic proud.ter of American Gothic proud...

...Novelist Wolfe, like journalist Wolfe, is suspicious of sentiment...

...Thirty-one chapters later, Bonfire concludes with a riot in a Bronx courtroom...

...Larry Kramer, the pettifogging assistant district attorney prosecuting McCoy for the hit-and-run injury of a eighteen-year-old black kid from the South Bronx's "Edgar Allen Poe" projects, tells why the Irish are revered...

...For among the many things that Bonfire is - an ingenious comic extravaganza, a courtroom melodrama, an apocalyptic rumination - it is first and perhaps foremost a 659-page love letter to New York's Irish wiseguys...

...it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart...

...Wolfe is still very much the reporter, and at some gut level these characters are more observed than fully imagined...

...The ones that became cops were the ones that the church got a hook into, the ones that cooked a little bit from guilt...

...But when a man dedicated to the atomized whirl is spun off, he discovers that the fall, like his climb to the top, knows no limit...

...However, in the middle of all this Dickensian turmoil, Bonfire places the unsatisfactory enigma of Sherman McCoy...

...Them and us...

...Paul Baumann Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, New York's Irish cops and lawyers, with their deep cynicism and their even deeper, seemingly archaic loyalties, seem to be all that stands between the city's barely realized civil order and anarchy...

...tional obligations and even prejudices...

...The only difference is, if you are a cop, you can do it legally with a priest nodding over you and looking the other way at the same time...

...The pedagogic tone here is jarring, but Wolfe, like all satirists, is at heart a moralist...

...Despite a welter of details - we know the price of everything he wears, of every piece of furniture in his $3-million-dollar apartment - our protagonist remains something of a sociological construct...

...Inter faeces et urinam we are born, and this author seems gleeful about it...

...Of course, McCoy's fate is emblematic...

...Edgar Allen Poe Towers in the South Bronx - Poe, the novel reminds us, lived out his last days in the Bronx - is the most acute manifestation of disconnectedness...

...Hey, gedoudahere...

...New York's Jewish mayor feverishly fantasizes as he is driven from a Harlem stage by a black mob in the opening scene...

...For $75,000 Killian and Quigley deflect the press ("The lice of public life...

...As the title proclaims, there is an apocalyptic tone to this, Wolfe's first novel...

...He knew that something in his (Det...

...McCoy, shrewd exploiter of a decade of giddy speculation in the bond market, unadulterated Wasp, doyen of Park Avenue, and the blue-blood incarnation of contemporary privilege and status has stumbled into an unrelieved nightmare...

...Tommy Killian, the fast-tawkin ("This case has nothing to do with justice...

...While driving his mistress home from the airport, he takes a wrong turn and ends up in the most desolate section of the South Bronx...

...But his obtuse emotional life and bombastic self-pity are too broad a stroke...

...The excitement is so intense and the pleasure is so unbridled and the gowns and the food and the drink and the flesh are so sumptuous - [but] that is all they have...

...No, it's the "stone courage," the street smarts, the "donkey" obstinacy of New York City's Irish...

...Although Wolfe dismissed such a dire prognosis for America in that essay, clearly that is the fate McCoy and his unlikely soulmates among the poor endure...

...That display is of course a way of reconfirming rank and status, but it amounts to little more than an endless, aimless craving to be admired and amused...

...In between is the hunt for Sherman McCoy, the "Great White Defendant," the answer to Bronx District Attorney Abe Weiss's ("Captain Ahab") most fervent reelection prayers...

...and for the five hundredth time in his career as an assistant district attorney in the Bronx he paid silent homage to that most mysterious and coveted of male attributes, Irish machismo...

...Once again we are held in awe by this writer's mastery of point of view, his attention to the subtlest calibrations of social status, his lucid exposition, and Rabelaisian humor...

...Obsessively he mocks the worldly pretensions of his characters by juxtaposing every kind of pride with the crude corruption and folly of the flesh...

...A very Poe-like terror descends...

...Still, an exhilarating intelligence animates nearly every scene...

...He "wants it now...

...Ed was a hell of a cop...

...He is abandoned by business associates, neighbors, and friends...

...Bonfire is as ambitious as its operatic title suggests, for it is about nothing less than the self-deluding conceits, the habitual cowardices, and anomie rotting the sills and cracking the foundation of "the greatest city of the twentieth century...

...Money is the only measure of a man, and the display of wealth a necessary social duty...

...is other people, all the people you're tied to, and it's only a thread...

...And in the novel's most pointed burlesque, the corpse of one sybarite is defenestrated from the ladies' room of a fashionable Manhattan restaurant...

...But they all like the same things...

...They all like to butt heads and loosen people's teeth...

...This is a war...

...Ed Quigley is the best," he says, explaining McCoy's need for a private investigator...

...An absurd concatenation of events dissolves McCoy's once insulated world...

...Back to blood...

...Only one thing stands between thir- ty-eight-year-old Wall Street whiz Sherman McCoy, once a self-proclaimed Master of the Universe ("There was . . . no limit whatsoever...

...When two menacing-looking black youths appear, his mistress hits one with the car...

...This is also, by a telling coincidence, the code of the street hustler and the revolutionary...

...In one character's after-dinner excursus on Poe's "Mask of the Red Death," McCoy recognizes his own fatal hubris...

...In this sense, Wolfe's admiration for the solidity of New York's working class (obviously, they need not be Irish), suggests that only archaic loyalties keep us civilized...

...Often brilliantly, always extravagantly, Wolfe conjures up the cacophony of voices, the avalanche of lies, the violence, vulgarity, and greed that make New York such an intoxicant...

...McCoy's harrowing descent into the maelstrom of the "other" New York brings him up shatteringly against the futility of such an existence...

...BOOKS An icy dip in the real world Whaddaya whaddaya...

...In "The Me Generation and the Third Great Awakening,'' Wolfe cited De Toc-queville on the insecurity inherent in an egalitarian society...

...the courts, and the politicians, all of whom conspire to lynch McCoy by his prep-school neck...

...He was boorish enough to die over dinner...

...With near perfect pitch, he describes life in and around the besieged Bronx County Building, where a bizarre parade of assistant district attorneys, lawyers, cops, jurists, con men, and thugs puts a face on the abstraction known as the criminal justice system...

...criminal lawyer tutoring the wayward bond salesman McCoy on how to survive an "icy dip in the real world," outlines the origins of this singularly Irish urban competence...

...The kids Ed ran with all became hoodlums or cops...

...So much for the finer points of casuistry...

...He's your basic hardcore New York Hell's Kitchen Irishman...

...McCoy encounters these fantastic, hardheaded tough guys - Tommy Kil-lian, Bill Martin, Ed Quigley, Bernie Fitzgibbon and a host of others, including the"Jewish Shamrock'' Goldberg- when he becomes part of the"chow'' fed to New York's criminal justice system...

...Your self...