The Bonfire of the Vanities.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan

Two Cheers For Tom Wolfe

In his memorable introduction to The New Journalism, a 1973 collection of classic magazine pieces, Tom Wolfe declared that modern American fiction was dead. The novel had lost touch with its roots, he wrote, with the "joys of detailed realism and its strange powers." Wolfe thought the new king of letters was journalism, which could provide the texture and in sight of Dickens or Dostoevsky with the added benefit of being true.

For young journalists, this was intoxicating stuff. Why feel guilty about that abandoned novel in the desk drawer? The future was in reporting. And reporting was suddenly more than just relevant or fun. While Woodward and Bernstein were busy proving that journalism could bring down the government, wolfe showed how it could change writing and enrich the culture. The ideal of applying the techniques of fiction to journalism, if not original to Wolfe, nonetheless kicked off a golden age in American journalism. Even his worst imitators could not dim the importance of what he had done.

Then, after the enormous success of The Right Stuff, Wolfe changed his mind. He embarked on a novel, which first was serialized in Rolling Stone. The original installments, often written under extreme deadline pressure, were engaging but unsatisfying. When the novel appeared, it was clear why. Wolfe's original protagonist was a famous Upper East Side novelist; now he was a bond trader on Wall Street. The substitution was essential to the book's success.

For something had changed in New York. Since the 1920s, the reigning cultural con men--the ones who cut the wides swath in the life of the city, whatever thier real talent--had been in the arts. Wall Street was just a place where you made a living. But by the mid-1980s, this was no longer true. The biggest con artists were no longer artists.

That meant that satirizing bloated literary or artistic figures was suddenly not much of a public service. In the classic "W" formulation, Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein were Out; Saul Steinberg (the financier, not The New Yorker cartoonist) and John Gutfreund (the chief of Salomon Bros.) were In. And it wasn't just that a few corporate raiders found their names in the papers all the time. The status was trickling down. Before long, bond traders were not only making a fortune, they were actually getting laid more than sculptors from the Village, a remarkable social transformation.

There's little need to reprise the uproarious and exhaustively reviewed highlights of this book. "Lemon Tarts" (the gorgeous young blonds on the arms of septuagenarian billionaires) and "social X rays" (Pat Buckley and Nan Kempner types; too rich and too thin) may soon enter the language along with "radical chic," "The Me Decade" and Wolfe's other nonfiction contributions. The Bavardage dinner party is as revealing as any cooked up by Proust. The speaker-phone conference call with Gene Lopwitz (supposedly based on Gutfreund) should shame that instrument of communication out of existence. Peter Fallow, Wolfe's freeloading British tabloid journalist, has a friend who writes Marxist diatribes while supporting himself with fluffery...