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In the middle class is a Hasidic landlord who bugs his rent-controlled apartments in the hope that he can learn of a violation that will enable him to evict low-paying tenants. Peter Fallow, the boozy London-expatriate reporter for Manhattan's British-owned tabloid the City Light, is a major contribution to the literature of journalistic sleaze. Lawrence Kramer, an assistant district attorney in the Bronx, exudes the resentment of a young man who has to live in a small, narrow, $888-a-month apartment ("a slot") with his wife, new baby and nurse (paid for by his mother-in-law). The underclass is represented mainly by ghetto felons: armed robbers who list their occupations as "security guards" and young drug pushers who have mastered "the Pimp Roll," a swaggering gait not uncommon on the city's streets.
Wolfe's heroes are men who can be reckless in their commitments to professionalism, another name for courage. He has admired these types before, most fully in his portrait of Test Pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, the type is represented by a feisty old Jewish judge, an Irish criminal lawyer and an Irish investigator for the D.A.'s office. Wolfe pays conditional tribute to what he identifies as Celtic machismo, a refusal to back off from confrontations, and passes on the street theory that regardless of race or background, all members of the New York City police department eventually become Irish.
The provocations of Bonfire are not gratuitous. They are embedded in convincing contexts and experienced through the eyes, ears and nerve endings of the characters. This technique is what makes Wolfe's journalism so vital and gives him authority as a novelist. This, and his ability to handle an imaginative and intricate plot that welds his descriptions of dinner parties, restaurant games, Wall Street trading and courthouse chaos into more than a tour de force. Even at more than 600 pages, Bonfire moves with a swift comic logic. It has become a critical cliche to say that a book is hard to put down. Those who think that they can casually dip into this one, fuhgedaboudit.