"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 he calls "this week's restaurant of the century." Inside these land yachts, the young and newly rich slurp drinks while waiting for their names to be announced for the next available table. The highest status will be conferred on the toff who gets embraced by the restaurant's owner.
Wolfe has been chronicling the behavior of the city's haves and have-mores since 1962, when he joined the New York Herald Tribune as a general-assignment reporter and quickly became the main attraction of the newspaper's Sunday magazine supplement. His timing, like his trademark white suit, was impeccable and dramatic. After two-stepping through the Eisenhower era, America was ready to rock 'n' roll. Wolfe covered the arrival of the Beatles for their first U.S. tour and caught the moment with a description of hysterical fans throbbing like alien protoplasm against the plate glass of the airport waiting room. The story stretched conventional journalistic license, but few readers could deny that this brightly tailored, soft-spoken Virginian was up to something new.
His later magazine pieces about Southern stock-car racing, California auto customizers, Manhattan's Pop art world, funky fashions and the navel engagements of the self-awareness movement confirmed Wolfe's originality. Unlike the reigning intellectuals of the day, he took American mass culture at face value, though not with a straight face. His New Journalism combined the skills and stamina of an ace reporter with the techniques of fiction, and it reached its peak in The Right Stuff, the 1979 recounting of the lives and times of the Mercury astronauts.
To call The Bonfire of the Vanities Wolfe's first novel is to make a distinction without too much difference. The ingeniously rigged plot is clearly fictional, but the details of New York City life, high and low, leap from the legman's notebook. The novel first appeared in Rolling Stone four years ago and ran in 27 installments. Since then, Wolfe has thoroughly rewritten it. The crucial change was to make the leading character a Wall Street broker (pre Black Monday) instead of a writer. "Writers are not much affected by scandal," says the author, "but bond salesmen can be ruined." Moreover, the alteration meant that Wolfe had to study the breed in its habitat, to examine its plumage, to listen to the roar of "well-educated young white men baying for money." In short, New Journalism shares much with the traditional novel of manners and society. "Realism is a plateau from which literature cannot back down," says Wolfe, acknowledging his debt to Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens and Evelyn Waugh.