Volume 35, Number 1 · February 4, 1988
Low Expectations
By Thomas R. Edwards
The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 659 pp., $19.95
Authors are not responsible for what even their friendliest critics say about them, and Tom Wolfe shouldn't be blamed for George Will's statement that Wolfe's first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, is 'Victorian, even Dickensian' in its scope and its 'capacity to convey and provoke indignation.' Both Dickens and Wolfe, to be sure, write social comedy of a broad, even outrageous, theatricality, enlarging social observation into drama, or melodrama, in which conflicting human desires suggest pathological disturbances within the body politic. But Dickens also had the artist's saving interest in mystery. He understood how to hold his reader by concealing the connections between characters and events just as long as possible, and he knew that in serious fiction even caricatures should be hard to see all the way around, that they can suggest more than their assigned parts require.
Review, 2562 words
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