A huge, seething more-or-less-literary potboiler of a novel which sets out to paint a picture of New York in the 80s - as a city on the point of exploding under the stress of race and class-related tensions, pushed and pulled by rampant capitalism and uncontrollable crime - and compels and convinces in the attempt. I first started reading it one morning at Simona's house, having stayed over the night before and found myself awake long before she was likely to be stirring, and made a pretty serious dent in it at the time (got a solid quarter of the way in); that must've been late 2003, and yet it's stayed with me clearly enough that now, two and a half years on, every scene was familiar and I knew exactly when I'd got up to the point where I left off last time.
It's not exactly subtle but there's an absolute urgency to it, and it really had me turning the pages, often having to resist the temptation to skim passages in order to find out what would happen next; also, it has the virtue of being very funny in patches (the scene at the dinner party, where Sherman is attempting to grin his way through a conversation with Maria for the benefit of his possibly onlooking wife, Judy, is particularly fine) and of knowing how to direct that humour. The Bonfire Of The Vanities is a Big Book, and if some of its characters are drawn perhaps a little too broadly or its themes underlined just slightly too often, I'm willing to forgive it because it so thoroughly succeeds in the old-fashioned aims of presenting a gripping story and strongly evoking its subject and milieu.
