I146;LL TAKE NY

Is New York still the city Tom Wolfe wrote about 20 years ago?

Twenty years ago, the acid-penned journalist Tom Wolfe unleashed his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Skewering everyone from self-absorbed Wall Street millionaires to hucksterish street politicians, the sprawling satire painted a picture of a New York declining inexorably into racial conflict, crime and greed. The novel tapped, to electrifying effect, a vein of anxiety that defined the 1980s New York. The novel was published in 1987.

For much of this year, the lens of New Yorkers8217; nostalgia has been trained on 1977, looking back 30 years to the blackout and looting, to the Son of Sam killings, to disco.

Now, as Wolfe turns his attention to a new novel about immigration8212;set in Miami8212;the milestone of Bonfire provides a moment to consider how the city8217;s own narrative has turned out. The novel8217;s antihero, a cosseted WASP bond trader named Sherman McCoy, takes a wrong turn off a highway in the Bronx and blunders into a confrontation with two young black men who seem to be about to rob him until his mistress grabs the wheel of his Mercedes and runs one of them down. Sherman, the self-styled 8220;Master of the Universe,8221; at first exults in his escape from what he calls 8220;the jungle.8221; But inescapably, through his own moral failings and the machinations of corrupt prosecutors, activists and journalists, he meets his downfall.

To some New Yorkers, Wolfe8217;s satire was bitingly accurate. To others, it was a cynical endorsement of racial stereotypes. Either way, the New York of Bonfire no longer exists. Not in reality, and not in the collective imagination. New York is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, down from 2,245 in 1990. The white population is no longer shrinking, and diverse immigration has made the city less black-and-white. The mostly black and Latino residents of Melrose now worry about an influx of outsiders.

8220;Twenty years later, the cynicism of The Bonfire of the Vanities is as out of style as Tom Wolfe8217;s wardrobe,8221; proclaimed the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose counterpart in the book, Reverend Bacon, warns that he controls the burgeoning 8220;steam8221; of black anger. 8220;It becomes increasingly implausible for the Wall Street multimillionaire white folk living in 8 million Manhattan apartments to feel themselves oppressed by poor black people,8221; said Ronald L. Kuby, who was the partner of William Kunstler, the radical lawyer who died in 1995. 8220;Far from fleeing, they are flooding in.8221;

Wolfe said that if he were to try again now to tap the zeitgeist of New York, he would write an entirely different book. Today8217;s version, he said, would be about how the city8217;s sanitised streets have become a stage on which New York plays itself, for an audience of tourists. 8220;This is a city now built on excitement,8221; Wolfe said8212;8220;a Disneyland8221; . The bond traders and investment bankers who populate Bonfire are passeacute; now, replaced by brash new hedge fund managers who meet clients barefoot, or in jeans with 6,000 belt buckles, as if to say, 8220;You don8217;t have to like me, I8217;m merely a genius who makes you money.8221;

But one thing hasn8217;t changed, Wolfe said: the allure of New York. It8217;s what distracted Sherman as he gazed at the glittering skyline from the Triborough Bridge8212;thinking, 8220;There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century8221;8212;and missed his turn to Manhattan.
-Anne Barnard nyt