Bonfire of the Vanities

Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities clearly shows Ecclesiastes influence. The title is taken from the 15th century European practice of gathering together objects of vice, lewd literature, cosmetics, and other objects of temporal pleasure and burning them in a big fire in the center of town. In accordance with the theology of Ecclesiastes, the pleasures of life are to be enjoyed as gifts of God but are not to be sought after as one seeks after a prize, and once received are not to be tightly held. Life is fleeting and one's position and possessions do not make one's life. Christ also expressed this idea when he said that one's life does not consist in the abundance of one's possessions.

Wolfe's famous novel is a pastiche of characters from New York in the 1980's, from the excessively self-seeking Wall Street bond trader ('Master of the Universe') Sherman McCoy, about whom the novel revolves, to his Russian mistress, his anorexic and aging wife, and the self-seeking civil rights activist Rev. Bacon, and the druken British journalist who writes and expose about McCoy. Each character seeks his own vanities, his own temporal happiness of position, fame, sex, or money, and each character's story weaves together to a growing personal catastrophe for McCoy and a revelation of hypocrisy for the others.

The style of the novel evokes the Vanity Fair literature of nineteenth century British society and appears again in a new novel about the go-go years of Chinese industrialization, Yu Hua's critically-acclaimed Brothers to which Bonfire of the Vanities has been compared: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100423108. The literary device of exposing the hollowness of one's objects of adoration has been used by others as well, including Charles Dickens, by whom Wolfe as well as Hua were influenced.