Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 7

The Limits of Narcissism: Self
and Society in Tom Wolfe’s
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Reviewers of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities have
tended to focus their critiques upon two main ideas: the extent to
which the novel is less fiction than fictionalized reportage, another
variety of the New Journalism;! and Wolfe’s acknowledged debt to
such nineteeth-century novelists as Zola, Dickens, Thackeray,
Dreiser, and others.^ Frank Rich links these two influences when he
writes that "with its echoes of Thackeray and its pointed references
to Dickens and Fanny Trollope (among others). Vanities at once
aspires to 19th-century social realism and hopes to demonstrate how
such fiction resembles meticulously reported, stylishly written,
satirically bent reportage just like Wolfe's own" (Rich 42). Rich’s use
of verbs like "aspires" and "hopes" suggests that Wolfe does not quite
succeed in his aims, and Rich is not alone in thinking so. Unfavorably
comparing Wolfe's novel to another famous tale of the wealthy and
powerful, Nicholas Lemann maintains that "Wolfe’s narrative voice
doesn't allow for the deep, almost lovely sadness of The Great
Gatsby” (Lemann 107), and Richard Vigilante argues that the novel,
an "experiment in radically journalistic fiction," sounds like a
"sociology lecture" with characters who function as "audio-visual
aids—trotted out to verify the thesis" (Vigilante 48). Just what that
thesis is, however, is never adequately explained by the reviewers,
nor are we likely to recognize it by comparing Wolfe to Fitzgerald or
Dickens or Thackeray or Wharton or any of the other supposed
influences on or "echoes" in the novel.
To be sure, there is an easily discernible thesis or theme in
Bonfire. It concerns the pernicious effects of conspicuous wealth and
power on contemporary American society. Wolfe, the social
commentator who named the 1970's the "Me Decade," regards the
l980's as "the decade of money fever," a decade in which "money,
greed, reaches all through society" and which is "not likely to
produce heroic figures" ("Master of His Universe" 90). In another
interview, he called the period the "Purple Decade," "purple in the
sense of royal purple" since people are more blatant in their pursui Ё