I’LL TAKE NY

Now, as Wolfe turns his attention to a new novel about immigration—set in Miami—the milestone of Bonfire provides a moment to consider how the city’s own narrative has turned out. The novel’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 “Master of the Universe,” at first exults in his escape from what he calls “the jungle.” But inescapably, through his own moral failings and the machinations of corrupt prosecutors, activists and journalists, he meets his downfall.

To some New Yorkers, Wolfe’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.

“Twenty years later, the cynicism of The Bonfire of the Vanities is as out of style as Tom Wolfe’s wardrobe,” proclaimed the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose counterpart in the book, Reverend Bacon, warns that he controls the burgeoning “steam” of black anger. “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,” said Ronald L. Kuby, who was the partner of William Kunstler, the radical lawyer who died in 1995. “Far from fleeing, they are flooding in.”

Wolfe said that if he were to try again now to tap the zeitgeist of New York, he would write an entirely different book. Today’s version, he said, would be about how the city’s sanitised streets have become a stage on which New York plays itself, for an audience of tourists. “This is a city now built on excitement,” Wolfe said—“a Disneyland” . The bond traders and investment bankers who populate Bonfire are passé now, replaced by brash new hedge fund managers who meet clients barefoot, or in jeans with $6,000 belt buckles, as if to say, “You don’t have to like me, I’m merely a genius who makes you money.”

But one thing hasn’t changed, Wolfe said: the allure of New York. It’s what distracted Sherman as he gazed at the glittering skyline from the Triborough Bridge—thinking, “There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century”—and missed his turn to Manhattan.
-Anne Barnard (nyt)