In the frenzy of 1980s-bashing that seized the cultural elite following the election of Bill Clinton last November, a highly relevant anniversary went unnoticed: The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s first novel, turned five years old. Odd that not a single pundit took the trouble to bid farewell to the Masters of the Universe, those “mere boys, with smooth jawlines and clean arteries,” who bought three-million-dollar apartments on Park Avenue and carried to work “one of those burgundy leather attaché cases that come from Mädler or T. Anthony on Park Avenue and have a buttery smoothness that announces: ‘I cost $500.’”
Yet The Bonfire of the Vanities is not much talked about these days, even by New Yorkers. Perhaps this has something to do with the failure of the half-witted movie Brian De Palma made of it; more likely it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, the work of earnest liberals trying to persuade themselves that the 1980s really are over at last, and thus no longer worth talking about. At any rate, it is worth taking a second look at Bonfire, if only to see just what it was that we officially put behind us on November 3, 1992.
Bonfire is still perfectly intelligible, since next to nothing about New York has changed since it was written.
When I told a friend I was rereading Bonfire, he said, “It must be completely unintelligible by now—it was so much a product of its
