How the Mighty Have Fallen

Wall Street tycoon and self-proclaimed Master of the Universe, Sherman McCoy.  Assistant DA, Larry Kramer.  Drunken tabloid reporter, Peter Fallow.  Morally-deficient Southern diva, Maria Ruskin.

In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe has created a vivid cast of unforgettable characters, whose smug, self-important, self-serving attitudes are manifest in their criticism of others, their unsavory thought-lives, and their depraved actions.  

Each one rationalizes, and even glorifies, his own vain choices, and each believes he is in control of his destiny.  Wolfe brilliantly demonstrates that each one is trying desperately to "shepherd the wind" but is unable.  Their attempts to control their lives are futile.

I couldn't help but compare this book to my recent experience with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which I did not review favorably).  Both stories are packed with sordid details of human sin, but whereas GWDT sensationalizes the failures of its shallow characters, one walks away from Bonfire knowing the souls of its characters and feeling the sting and utter emptiness of their lives.

One way Wolfe's story exceeds Larrson's, is in its reversals...the literary and biblical kind in which the mighty ones fall, the rich are sent empty away, the proud are brought low.   In fact, near the end of the story - when his folly has been exposed, he has been tried in the arena of public opinion, and he has lost his reputation, his family and his money - here is where the self-made, self-exalted, Master of the Universe, Sherman McCoy, finds himself:

Every bit of honor, respect, dignity, that he, a creature named Sherman McCoy, might ever have possessed had been removed, just like that, and it was his dead soul that now stood here in the rain, in handcuffs, in the Bronx, outside a mean little metal door, at the end of a line of a dozen other prisoners.

As his life continues to unravel, his plight worsens:

"He looked at the sky and listened to the sounds, just the sounds, the orotund tropes and sententiae, the falsetto songs, the inquisitory shouts, the hippo mutterings, and he thought: I'm not going back in there [prison], ever.  I don't care what it takes to keep me out, even if I have to stick a shotgun in my mouth.

The only shotgun he had was, in fact, double-barreled.  It was a big old thing.  He stood on 161st Street, a block from the Grand Concourse, in the Bronx, and wondered if he could get both barrels in his mouth.

McCoy doesn't find redemption.  In spite of his carefully-crafted world crumbling around him, we sense that pride still governs his heart...and yet, there is also a sense that he is heading further down and when he hits bottom, he just may look up and plead for deliverance.