Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is his 11th book but his first novel. Happily for him, it looks like being that publisher's dream, a runaway best-seller which is also critically acclaimed. But I guess it will not, at the end of the day, be as highly ranked as the author's new journalism (Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers), his polemics on aesthetics (From Bauhaus to Our House) or his American epic docufiction (The Right Stuff). One sees less a new career in The Bonfire of the Vanities than a sharp detour in a career which has already proved the most unpredictable in modern literature.

LRB 18 February 1988 | PDF Download