num_pages: 690
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: English
title: Bonfire of the Vanities
titlecomplete: Bonfire of the Vanities
characters: Linwood Talley, Ferdinand Arguello, Greg Rosenwald, Miss Lyons, John Campbell McCoy, Brian Highridge, Alex Britt-Withers, Eugene Lopwitz, Kate di Ducci, Gil Archer, Asher Herzfeld, Baron Hochswald, St. John Thomas, Arthur Ruskin, Sherman McCoy, Caroline Heftshank, Bernard Levy, Peter Fallow, Guliaggi, Gloria Dawson, Lewis Sanderson, Warren Bottomley, Huck Thigg, Nick Stopping, Annie Lamb, Irv Stone, Jimmy Caughey, Mike Bellavita, Red Pitt
genres: Fiction, American, Humor, Literature, Classics, Novels, Contemporary, New York, 20th Century, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 79415
places: New York (State), New York City, New York
awards: awardedAt: 568022400000
name: Ambassador Book Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 536486400000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction
publisher: Bantam Books