Purgatory of the Vanities (novel)

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Purgatory of the Vanities (original English title The Bonfire of the Vanities , published in 1987 by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York ) is probably the most important and best-known work of the American writer Tom Wolfe . It first appeared as a serialized novel in Rolling Stone magazine from July 1984 to August 1985 . In 1990, the novel was Brian De Palma filmed .

The title was borrowed from Savonarola's "falò delle vanità"; he had stakes erected in Florence in the late 15th century, on which he burned objects that were regarded as vain and indecent and had been collected from the population. Their owners should thereby experience purification.

The main characters

After a prologue, which describes how the New York mayor is shouted down by an angry crowd in Harlem , the acting characters are introduced.

Sherman McCoy is thirty-eight and earned a broker at the Wall Street millions with which he is an apartment at the exquisite Park Avenue can afford and own service personnel. His father is also wealthy, but has style, which the nouveau riche Sherman totally lacking - and just as his wife Judy, a hysterical climber from the middle class of the Midwest that their time selling itself as an interior designer and spends money her husband for expensive interior. The spoiled daughter Campbell attends a classy private school. McCoy is the prototype of the elite WASP , he has a noble Yale chin , which is the symbol of his arrogant demeanor.

The Jewish public prosecutor Larry Kramer is frustrated about almost all aspects of his life: that his formerly attractive wife Rhoda is gradually developing into a shtetl mom , that the birth of his son will thwart his fitness training and thus tie him to his family forever, as Kramer fears With the shrinking of his muscles, his attraction to strange women also disappears; and, finally, that he earned less than his work colleagues, not to mention his former fellow students at New York's Columbia University , one of whom has already become a partner in a major law firm.

The British journalist Peter Fallow is not exactly successful with the (fictional) New York tabloid The City Light . His motivation for his profession has long since been lost, and he is now mainly concerned with extending the expenses for his articles as much as possible and by stealing free meals from invitations, which he particularly enjoys because he detests Americans.

The plot

Sherman McCoy has a southern lover who he picks up at the airport one evening by car. He gets lost with her in the Bronx , where the two blacks meet; feeling threatened by them, they drive off in a hurry, and one of the blacks is hit by McCoy's lover, who drives his Mercedes. Sherman's problems accumulate in the next few chapters, as his wife first finds out he's cheating on her and then he screws up a multi-million dollar securities deal.

Meanwhile, the young black man who was hit has fallen into a coma, and Reverend Bacon, a power-hungry and manipulative, supposed do-gooder and preacher from Harlem, is making the case a political issue with the help of Peter Fallow, who is hoping for a revival of his career . Fallow's story gets big in his newspaper as the owner is impressed with the exaggerated descriptions of the ghetto. Shortly afterwards, two Irish police officers manage to identify McCoy, whose supposed self-confidence collapses under their interrogation, as the driver of the car.

The case will now be handed over to Larry Kramer, who wants to make a career with this case - his ambitious supervisor Abe Weiss fears that he will be re-elected as district attorney if he is too negligent in prosecuting the case among the black majority in his district (the Bronx) Discredit comes because he is not particularly popular as a white and Jew anyway. Through a deliberate indiscretion, McCoy's name comes to the public, and he is immediately prejudiced by the sensational media. Civil rights activists demonstrate in front of his posh apartment, while Kramer persuades McCoy's lover to testify against him in order to go unpunished herself. McCoy is arrested and, to his horror, housed with a few common criminals at the Bronx Central Guard until bail is paid.

Now he strikes back: on the advice of a lawyer hired by him, he talks wired to his lover and, although she discovers the bug, can provide evidence that Kramer has influenced her. The tape eventually plays in court, and Kramer, who has to listen to McCoy's lover refer to him as a bloated little bastard , loses the case. McCoy is, however, as reported in an epilogue in the form of a fictional article in the New York Times , indicted again a year later because the black man has now died; Kramer has now fallen into disrepute after his affair with a juror has come to light, and Fallow has made a career while McCoy is divorced from his wife and has lost virtually all of his fortune in the lawsuit.

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Style consideration

Purgatory of the Vanities , despite its epic proportions, consists to a large extent of dialogues and experienced speech and is held in a realism that sometimes seems journalistic. The whole text is satirical through and through , and Wolfe lets his characters go to ruin with an ironic distance; On the other hand, the triumph of those who take advantage of the witch hunt against McCoy seems cynical. The conversations are reproduced like minutes and partly onomatopoeic, the very different jargons testify to Wolfe's precise powers of observation; the foggeddaboudafuckingshit slang of the police and prosecutors is parodied as well as the language of lawyers, stockbrokers and politicians as well as the ghetto idiom of blacks and the southern pronunciation of McCoy's lover.

filming

In 1990 the book was Brian DePalma filmed the role of Sherman McCoy was developed by Tom Hanks and the role of Peter Fallow of Bruce Willis played.

expenditure

  • Purgatory of the vanities

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joshua J. Masters: Race and the Infernal City in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Tom Wolfe. From the Modern Critical Views series. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001. ISBN 0-7910-5916-2 , p. 179.