Today’s racial tensions echoed in Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanitiesis a popular novel from the 80s with a over-arching plot element that still rings important today, 30 years later, especially where I live in St Louis.

The book has around a dozen or so main characters, the central being Sherman McCoy. McCoy is a wall street investor, who despite making a lot of money, still manages to live well above his means. He also lives hard, running around on his wife with Maria Ruskin. One night him and Maria get lost in a rough part of town, and when approached by a pair of young black men, they panic and race off in his Mercedes, but not before hitting one of the men. McCoy wants to immediately go to the police, but Maria refuses to, saying that it is her choice because she was driving.

Over the next few days, McCoy begins to think they got away with it, but a story pops up in the paper of a young black man in the hospital, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run. Henry Lamb is in a coma now, on death’s door, and the author of the story, Peter Fallow, is trying to get the word out there. Over the ensuing weeks, the black community is up in arms, especially as details get out that Lamb had previously identified the car as a Mercedes and the driver as white. Racials tensions are enflamed by a local black community leader, Reverend Bacon, who claims Lamb was a good kid on the rise, on his way to college, leaving the projects he was raised in. He wants the police to chase after this white man as hard as they chase the black criminals. McCoy feels the noose around him tightening as more and more details come out.

The final parts of the book, McCoy’s arrest and the further missing elements of the case, all evolve in the final chapters. In the end though, the sideshow of the trial becomes the headline, and poor Henry Lamb is mostly forgotten. In fact his eventual death is only a footnote in the novel, as it would be in the papers of today. The book ends rather abrubtly, as the news cycle has all ready moved on to something else, which again, is no different than what we see today.

This is a great novel for even casual readers, and eye-opening for its context in today’s Black Lives Matter movements. Being written 30 years ago, it shows unfortunately not much has changed. I’ve left out much (it’s a long novel at 600+ pages), including many important elements and characters (the cops on the case, the D.A. trying to make a name for himself, McCoy’s lawyers and family). Well worth a read for fans of many genres.