What are the vices and failings of contemporary New York revealed in 'Bonfire of the Vanities'?

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Shashank Joshi

What are the vices and failings of contemporary New York revealed in Bonfire of the Vanities’?

In ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ Wolfe paints a picture of a city racked with sin; the ‘Unreal City’ that Eliot feared so greatly. The city, its inhabitants and their very principles are flawed to such an extent that the novel, in my opinion, reads as a tragedy.

The story opens with a brilliantly ironic situation: black Harlem residents heckle the mayor claiming that he has persecuted their minorities, telling him, “Don’t percentage no annual budget with us, man! We want jobs!” The only problem is that they simultaneously taunt him, calling him “Goldberg” and “Hymie.” Their distorted sense of values encapsulates the attitudes of this twisted city.  In the same way, The Reverend Bacon attacks the power structure, saying, “You think Sherman McCoy stands alone? You think he is by himself? He is one a the most powerful men at Pierce & Pierce, and Pierce & Pierce is one a the most powerful forces in Wall Street. I know Pierce & Pierce . . . see . . . I know what they can do. You heard a capitalists. You heard a plutocrats. You take a look at Sherman McCoy and you’re looking at a capitalist, you’re looking at a plutocrat.” Once again, the situation is laced with irony as Bacon has invested huge sums of money with the very bank he just criticised. Priorities are bizarre, but most worryingly of all, the rant holds some truth. “Do you really think this is your city any longer? Open your eyes! The greatest city of the twentieth century! Do you think money will keep it yours?” asks Wolfe. This question is a motif for the author, but the answer is clearly ‘yes, we do.’ Like Waugh in ‘A Handful of Dust,’ Wolfe leaves no person untouched: the minorities are depicted as groups busy insulting other and harassing each other. The people in power want to “insulate, insulate, insulate,’ and the alleged ‘melting pot’ is about as mixed as oil and water. This is the moral downside to the American Dream. Yet Wolfe does not condemn this; in fact, his ‘new journalism’ style of writing gives the writing an ironically sensationalist tone that mocks the insecurities and superficiality of modern-day New York.

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However, consider Wolfe’s novel in it social context: monetarist ideologies were in vogue and so a crude form of Reaganism was America’s economic model – a model epitomize by Milton Friedman who claimed “What kind of a society isn't structured on greed?” and defined 1980s capitalism as  “an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm.”  Like the Brett-Easton Ellis novel ‘American Psycho,’ the underlying feeling (that never seems to actively bring itself forwards) seems to be that the core problem is a collective flaw; that of a defective system which is mistaken in the Smithian belief that ...

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