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Like these predecessors, Wolfe is a master of social satire; he is, in fact, the best of his generation. Bonfire is merciless and unrelenting in its depiction of New York as a city driven by ethnic and racial hostility, political ambition and status. What of idealism, ethics and refined impulses? In the words of one fulsome character, "fuhgedaboudit." Action is motivated by the seven deadly sins, distributed evenhandedly among the city's blacks, Irish, Jews and that overlooked minority, the rich Wasps.
Wolfe's main conceit is that the upper classes are especially vulnerable to prejudicial treatment if they lose their insulation. Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue and Southampton, the leading bond salesman at Pierce & Pierce, learns this harsh lesson when he is arrested for hit-and-run driving and plummets from a "Master of the Universe" to "the Great White Defendant," the dream of every ambitious $36,000-a-year assistant district attorney.
Middle-aged married female readers will be unsympathetic and even gleeful about Sherman's downfall. He is driving his young mistress Maria Ruskin home from Kennedy International Airport and feeling on top of the world when he mistakenly turns off the highway and gets lost in the South Bronx. There is a confrontation with two black youths, a scuffle, a hasty escape with the girlfriend now behind the wheel of his black Mercedes sports car. There is also a suspicious thok! against the car.
Maria, a bed-wise South Carolina belle and wife of an aging Jewish businessman who has made a fortune selling charter flights to Mecca-bound Arabs, discourages Sherman from reporting the incident to the police. Unfortunately, the mother of the badly injured boy is a friend of the Rev. Reginald Bacon's, whose specialty is political pressure and misappropriating social-service funds for his private use, an activity he justifies as "steam control." Bacon is shrewd, cunning, outrageous and, like the other shrewd, cunning, outrageous characters in Bonfire, not necessarily bigger than life.
Wolfe will most likely be denounced for creating comic characters who accurately reflect familiar and self-important fixtures in New York life. At the top of the heap are "social X rays," rumpless women of a certain age who believe one cannot be too rich or too thin. Sixtyish men of this stratum are frequently accompanied by "lemon tarts," sleek, young blonds. Sherman McCoy is a decent well-bred sort, neither more nor less lustful than most confident 38-year-old males and particularly amusing when he gives facts and figures about how one can go broke in Manhattan on $1 million a year.