Bonfire of the Vanities

Hi, welcome to our blog.  The first book I read this year was Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.  It's perhaps most famous for being adapted into a film version with Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks, which was a notorious flop.  I have never seen this movie.  

When I started reading this book, I was expecting it to be a Wall Street satire like American Psycho. In the context of our current financial mess, I thought that reading something like that would be interesting.  Instead, I found the book to be more like a John Grisham style courtroom procedural.  Sure, Wolfe has a good eye for realistic, journalistic detail.  He's also got a conservative streak a mile wide.  The female characters are all portrayed as manipulative, while the closest the book has to a villian seems to be modeled on Al Sharpton.  The Wall Street bond trader at the center of the story, meanwhile, comes off as the hapless victim of the circumstances around him.  Maybe the Wall Street mess of 2009 makes the Wall Street greed of the eigthies seem quaint in comparison. 

At any rate, I bought this book at a discount when the Borders in downtown Minneapolis was going out of business, which seemed appropriate.