Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 20

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The Popular Culture Review

it is detached from the social niceties and strictures he once observed,
and he behaves accordingly: during a riot in the courtroom, he
punches a man whom he once would have feared (679); asked by the
judge during the riot whether he wants to get killed, Sherman
replies, "Judge, it don't matter" (684); when he comes to court to
defend himself later, he appears wearing an open-necked sport shirt,
khaki pants, and hiking shoes instead of his expensive tailor-made
suits (687). With these contrastive alterations in Sherman's
behavior, language, and dress, Wolfe reveals far more than a mere
"bonfire of the vanities." Rather, by showing us the effects of society
on the self, he reveals the limits of narcissism.
Pennsylvania State University

Leonard Mustazza

N otes
1. *Tm a journalist at heart; even as a novelist. I'm first of all a journalist,"
Wolfe said in an interview with Time magazine. "1 think all novels should be
journalism to start, and if you can ascend from that plateau to some
marvelous altitude, terriflc. I really don't think it's possible to understand the
individual without understanding the society" ("Master of His Universe" 92).
His reputation as a journalist, however much he cherishes it, has led
numerous reviewers to take him less than seriously as a writer of fiction.
Time's review of the book suggests that to call Bonfire Wolfe's first novel is
"to make a distinction without too much difference. The ingeniously rigged
plot is clearly fictional, but the details of New York City life, high and low, leap
from the legman's notebook" (Sheppard 101). Likewise, The New Republic
says that the book "may well be definitive journalism. Perhaps that's what its
author was glad to settle for" (Rich 46).
2. In the interview with Time, Wolfe freely admits that writers like
Dickens, Balzac, and Zola were indeed his models. "Particularly Zola. It's
the idea of the novelist putting the individual in the setting of society at large
and realizing the pressure society exerts on the individual. This is something
that has been lost over the past 40 years in the American novel" ("Master of
His Universe" 92). Moreover, like many of the nineteenth-century works he
admires. Bonfire was originally published in serial form, Wolfe had once
considered titling the work Vanity Fair as a tribute to Thackeray's great
novel.
3. In his best-known essay, "The Me Decade and the Third Great
Awakening," Wolfe argues that the economic boom following World War II
was responsible for changing the nature of the American class system. "It