In a departure from the fantasy fiction I've been reading, I decided to try a contemporary American general fiction writer. Why not Tom Wolfe? So I read his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, an excruciatingly satirical look at the entanglement of politics, avarice, ethnic and social class divisions...and vanity, as they remove any vestige of "justice" in a big city's criminal justice system... in this case, that of New York City in the 1980s. In a nutshell, without giving away the story to prospective future readers, a wealthy bonds trader named Sherman McCoy, while picking up a woman (with whom he is having an affair) from the airport, gets himself lost in traffic and the two find themselves in a run-down South Bronx neighborhood and encounter two young black men in an obstructed highway entrance ramp. What ensues there drives the story for the rest of the book, from the investigations of the incident by the press (by English journalist Peter Fallow) and district attorney's office (by assistant D.A. Larry Kramer) to the Al-Sharpton-like agitation and protests by Reverend Reginald Bacon. Each player in the story has their own personal agenda they are pursuing, and none of these really has anything to do with justice. Ultimately, McCoy becomes the politically-convenient WASP symbol of wealth that (1) the D.A., trying for reelection in his heavily minority-populated Bronx, (2) Fallow, looking to advance his journalism career, and (3) Bacon, trying to advance his own persona as a civil rights leader, can all use for themselves. Never mind the facts, it all becomes a farce of justice. As a matter of fact, the developing farcical nature of The Bonfire of the Vanities, to me at least, resembles the absurdity of the wartime military that Joseph Heller so aptly conveyed in his book Catch-22, published a quarter of a century earlier.
Each character in Bonfire is very consciously aware, to the point of obsession, of his or her own status regarding ethnicity, wealth, and social status and seems to be in a constant struggle to enhance that status. I wonder whether that's really what it's like in New York City with people in general, or even in other places (such as my own Gainesville). Or is Wolfe just exaggerating his characters' "vanities" to makes his own points? I tend to see his characterizations in much the same way that Heller made his, which was to point out the foibles (and humor) of people's perceptions about themselves and their often ridiculous efforts to improve their perceived "positions".
I recommend Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. It also has an interesting kind of ending, expressed in its epilogue (I tend to be a "collector" of interesting story endings...like that in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example). I also discovered that a not-very-successful movie had been made for the book starring Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Bruce Willis. I think I'll just steer clear of that one, thank you...
