Books: The Haves and the Have-Mores THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES by Tom Wolfe; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 659 pages; $19.95

"This is the decade of plutography," says Tom Wolfe, author of such fireproof phrases as "radical chic" to describe affluent activists of the '60s and "the Me decade" to define the narcissistic '70s. Plutography is to money what pornography is to sex, explains the 56-year-old pioneer of the New Journalism, emphasizing that "today it is impossible to be too ostentatious." In Manhattan, where Wolfe and his wife, daughter and son occupy a four-story town house in the coveted East 60s, he notes that one of the latest examples of conspicuous display is the stretch limousines lined up in front of what...

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