num_pages: 704
description: Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy of New York in the last years of the twentieth century, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. Wolfe's gallery ranges from Wall Street, where people in their thirties feel like small-fry if they're not yet making a million per, to the real streets, where the aim is lower but the itch is just as virulent.We see this feverish landscape through the eyes of McCoy's wife and his mistress; the young prosecutor for whom the McCoy case would be the answer to a prayer; the ne'er-do-well British journalist who needs such a case to save his career in America; the street-wise Irish lawyer who becomes McCoy's only ally; and Reverend Bacon of Harlem, a master manipulator of public opinion. Above all, we see what happens when the criminal justice system-gorged with "the chow," as the Bronx prosecutor calls the borough's usual black and Latin felons-considers the prospect of being banded a prime cut like Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue.
language: French
title: Le Bûcher Des Vanités: Roman
titlecomplete: Le Bûcher Des Vanités: Roman
characters: Caroline Heftshank, St. John Thomas, Lewis Sanderson, Kate di Ducci, Jimmy Caughey, Sherman McCoy, Mike Bellavita, Annie Lamb, Brian Highridge, Alex Britt-Withers, Gloria Dawson, Eugene Lopwitz, Peter Fallow, Bernard Levy, Warren Bottomley, Gil Archer, Guliaggi, Ferdinand Arguello, Miss Lyons, Greg Rosenwald, Red Pitt, John Campbell McCoy, Baron Hochswald, Arthur Ruskin, Asher Herzfeld, Huck Thigg, Linwood Talley, Nick Stopping, Irv Stone
genres: Fiction, New York, Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Humor, American, Classics, 20th Century
ratings_count: 79436
places: New York City, New York, New York (State)
awards: awardedAt: 568022400000
name: Ambassador Book Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 536486400000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction
publisher: les Éd. de la Seine