Among the stack of unread books I forced myself to get through this year was Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

Overall, it was an interesting plot and certainly moved along decently for a book that doesn’t look gargantuan yet somehow clocks in at nearly 700 pages.  But boy did I have a hard time getting motivated to read it sometimes because there is not one character I wanted to root for.

In fact, there were three main characters I really, really, really wanted to urge on to failure.  But the dynamics of the story made even that an impossibility because the failure of any one of them was a major victory for at least one other.  In the end, I really was hoping to turn a page and find the entire place had been hit by an asteroid and the rest of the pages from then on were blank.

The mainest character (let’s pretend mainest is a word) is a Wall Street bond trader named Sherman who is riding in his car when his mistress hits someone.  The incident is far more complicated than that, and forms the basis for most of the plot, but just know that he’s not a likeable fellow.

But he does prompt an interesting image and question one night when he dresses surely better than I do every day, but is somehow embarrassed by that as he goes to take out the family dog.

“Rather than continue to pay around-the-clock shifts of Irishmen from Queens and Puerto Ricans from the Bronx $200,000 a year to run the elevators, the apartment owners had decided two years ago to convert the elevators to automatic. Tonight that suited Sherman fine. In this outfit, with this squirming dog in town, he didn’t feel like standing in an elevator with an elevator man dressed up like an 1870 Austrian army colonel.”

This is a great point.  Why is every elevator operator you’ve ever seen depicted dressed exactly like that?  Why was that necessary for the position?  I get dressing up and having a uniform, but that’s an odd one to settle on.

Beyond not particularly liking the characters, I do have to quibble with Wolfe’s depiction of a newsroom scene at the paper where one of the other not-so-great guys in the story works.  Wolfe sets up a harried universe of people hunched over their desks typing and once in a while coming up for air, and then this:

“A rear door opened, and a Greek wearing a white uniform came staggering in carrying a prodigious tray full of coffee and soda containers, boxes of doughnuts, cheese Danishes, onion rolls, crullers, every variety of muck and lard known to the takeout food business, and half the room deserted the computer consoles and descended upon him, rooting about the tray like starving weevils.”

Now, I’ve been in multiple newsrooms and this description is not nearly accurate.  And by that I mean when he says “half the room” went after the food, he should have said “absolutely everyone, perhaps even some who aren’t even working that day” went after the food.  That’s a known feature of the industry.  If you put food anywhere near us, we will set aside literally anything of any importance to go check it out.

Perhaps the only figure worthy of sympathy is Sherman’s wife, Judy.  She gets blindsided by the events of the book, and late in the story discusses the whole thing with him.  He tries to remind of how he used to tell her he would be a different kind of Wall Street guy and the kind of life they would have.  Clearly none of that happened and she doesn’t let him wrap the two of them up in the coat of sugar he wants.

“That’s a memory, Sherman, but it’s not alive.” Judy says. “All our memories of that time have been terribly abused.”

Now, not everyone does this on the level of Sherman or leads the descent that he does.  But don’t we all in some way use our own memories to explain away the present in a way that is not true to either?  It’s like the long ago former high school quarterback who threw three touchdowns in that one game that lifted a whole town and got him the girl and had him on the edge of going pro or something, but really was just another Friday in whatever place and maybe they actually lost that game.