His novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, spent 56 weeks on the hard-cover best-seller list, and currently leads the paperback list. He pioneered a kind of journalism that was remarkable for its vivid verisimilitude and its unflinching dissection of characters. In a conversation with New York bureau chief Bonnie Angelo, Wolfe predicts that the nation will seek a new moderation in its ways.
Q. Decades are artificial measures, but that's what we use, and you have a flair for defining them. You called the '60s "the whole crazed, obscene, & uproarious, Mammon-faced, drug-soaked, Mau Mau, lust-oozing '60s." The '70s were "the Me decade," "the sexed-up, doped-up, hedonistic heaven of the boom boom '70s." As we close out the '80s, how do you define the decade?
A. It is the decade of money fever. It's almost impossible for people to be free of the burning itch for money. It's a decade not likely to produce heroic figures.
In a way it's been an extension of normal human behavior, more than the '70s and '60s. Then there was a reluctance among educated people to show their affluence -- it was the time of the debutante in blue jeans who worked in a child-care center.
In the '80s people of affluence returned to the more normal thing: they had it, they showed it. And that radiated throughout society. When I was spending time in the Bronx, I saw young black men wearing chains with what I thought was the peace symbol. I thought, how interesting that these young men, living in such difficult circumstances, would still be concerned about such issues as world peace. And then I came to realize that these weren't peace symbols -- they were the hood ornament from a Mercedes. And they knew everything about a Mercedes, how much it cost, how fast it would go. They knew Mercedes as the car of choice of the drug dealer. Money, greed, reaches all through society.
Q. For 25 years, as a journalist and author, you have been a commentator on life-styles and mores in this country. What's happening to American society?
A. I wouldn't presume to call myself a commentator. That suggests having answers.
Since the 1960s we have had extraordinary freedom in this country, and we are seeing the good and the bad sides of the same coin. We've had tremendous prosperity. In many ways we have fulfilled the dream of the old utopian societies of the mid-19th century. But the other side of the coin of prosperity is money fever and the vanity that is the undoing of all the characters in Bonfire.
But I for one would not want to change this country. When you think about conditions across the long panorama, the poverty -- there's never been anything like this country, no parallel for what money and freedom have brought to Americans.
Q. Yet you seem pessimistic about our society. Is America going the same road as Rome at its height?
A. No. That's what is called the organic fallacy: countries are not plants, they don't have life cycles that mean there is a time to die. There's no . reason we should be on a downward course.
Q. In a speech at Harvard, you were concerned about the fifth freedom -- freedom from religion and ethical standards.