No Longer the "Bonfire of the Vanities"

This article from today's New York Times is not to be missed. It takes stock of how reality and perception of New York City and especially the Bronx has changed in the twenty years after Tom Wolfe published his famous and controversial first novel, the Bonfire of the Vanities. What makes the article worth a look is interviews with several of the real-life people on whom principal characters in the novel were based.

Here on Changing the Court, our colleague Phil Bowen shared his reflections on reading Bonfire of the Vanities in the Bronx Criminal Court. His assessment - shared by the writer in the Times - is that the New York of today is one more at ease with itself than that portrayed in Bonfire of the Vanities, and that the passions Mr. Wolfe depicted in his novel have cooled in the two decades that followed.