Looking back …

… ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities,’ 30 Years Later. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Ten years ago, on Bonfire’s 20th anniversary, Anne Barnard looked back on it in the New York Times, noting that while much of it (such as the portrait of Reverend Bacon) was prophetic, it also depicted a New York that, to a remarkable extent, had already disappeared by 2007. In a city that had seemed in 1987 to be hurtling toward anarchy, a mayor named Giuliani had overseen a stunning recovery. Crime rates had plummeted; slums whose underclass residents Wolfe had seen as destined to multiply and spread out, overrunning even the tonier parts of Manhattan, had themselves become rapidly gentrified. These trends have continued. Rereading the book recently, I imagined that to some young readers today, it might feel as old-fashioned as Middlemarch. It’s pre-cellphone, pre–World Wide Web. There are pay telephones; the bond traders’ ultra-high-tech computer screens are black with green letters and numbers on them. The Soviet Union still exists; 9/11 lies in the future; McCoy’s view of himself as a “Master of the Universe” seems quaint when one considers the wealth and power of today’s Silicon Valley billionaires.