Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 8

The Popular Culture Review

status than they were in the two previous decades (Mewbom 218).^
Bonfire clearly illustrates this view of life in our time through its
satiric portraits of the social "beehive" that buzzes in the
fashionable buildings along New York's Fifth and Park Avenues, of
the corrupt Black leadership that extorts money from guilt-ridden
liberals under the pretext of social justice, of the power-politics that
go on in City Hall and in the Bronx District Attorney's Office, politics
which have more to do with personal image and self-aggrandizement
than with public service. These and other foibles and excesses of life
in the '80's are treated to Wolfe's peculiarly effective brand of
satire,^ and if, as Vigilante suggests, some of his characters are made
of pasteboard that he can easily flatten, so be it. Such is the nature of
ail satiric commentary.
But on a deeper and more important thenuitic level~a level
that the reviewers fail or refuse to penetrate--Bon/frc is neither
satire nor poorly disguised journalism. Rather, like the works of
Wolfe's aclmowledged predecessors, it is a novel with a moral vision,
a work that focuses upon the ethical struggles of a man of his times,
pulling the con^ortable props out from under him and thus compelling
him (and the reader) to recognize the vacuity of his previously held
social beliefs. Sherman McCoy is a divided figure, at once the
product of an earlier, more principled time and of the materialistic
and ego-promoting present. The first of these influences implants
within him a keen sense of duty and moral values, the second a
variety of narcissistic urges-narcissism not in the pathological but
the sociological sense described by Christopher Lasch in his book The
Culture o f Narcissism, As such, his view of self and society is
distorted, reflected as it is in the odd-shaped mirror of conflicting
kinds of individual and class consciousness. When that brittle glass is
broken, Sherman is made to confront truths about himself and his
society, and it is in the depiction of that confrontation that Wolfe
concentrates his considerable narrative skills.
"The contemporary narcissist," Lasch writes, "bears only a
superficial resemblance, in his self-absorption and delusions of
grandeur, to the 'imperial self so often celebrated in nineteenthcentury American literature. The American Adam, like his
descendants today, sought to free himself from the past and to
establish what Emerson called 'an original relation to the universe'"
(Lasch 8). The main difference between the contemporary narcissist