"... interpretation! — a frisky wild animal..."

Some of you are reading Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" along with me. In the "Bonfire" project, here on the blog, I select a few consecutive sentences as I go along and offer them up for discussion. Please concentrate on the text. It's fine to bring in the context of the book, but give a spoiler alert if you're going beyond the chapter under discussion.

So let me give you this, from Kindle Location 1624:

Do you tell the police that Mrs. Arthur Ruskin of Fifth Avenue and Mr. Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue happened to be having a nocturnal tête-à-tête when they missed the Manhattan off-ramp from the Triborough Bridge and got into a little scrape in the Bronx? He ran that through his mind. Well, he could just tell Judy—no, there was no way he could just tell Judy about a little ride with a woman named Maria. But if they—if Maria had hit the boy, then it was better to grit his teeth and just tell what happened. Which was what? Well…two boys had tried to rob them. They blocked the roadway. They approached him. They said…A little shock went through his solar plexus. Yo! You need some help? That was all the big one had said. He hadn’t produced a weapon. Neither of them had made a threatening gesture until after he had thrown the tire. Could it be—now, wait a minute. That’s crazy. What else were they doing out on a ramp to an expressway beside a blockade, in the dark—except to—Maria would back up his interpretation—interpretation!—a frisky wild animal—all of a sudden he realized that he barely knew her.

To me, the most interesting part is "interpretation!—a frisky wild animal." And I've got to admit that I am not positive that interpretation is the frisky wild animal. Maybe Maria is the frisky wild animal.

It reminds me of the problem I had with the last "Bonfire" passage I discussed. Remember? Sherman was "holding a violently lurching animal in his arms, staring, bug-eyed, and talking to himself," and at first glance, it seemed to be the "violently lurching animal" (his dachshund) that was "staring, bug-eyed," and it was only when I got to "talking to himself" that I knew it was Sherman staring bug-eyed.

I do think a writer should be more careful. Wolfe seems to assume the reader will follow the wild pathways he intends to lay down. It's exciting and should be fast, but when multiple pathways open up, we're slowed down, or we just get sloppy and hurtle along. That's what Wolfe wants from us, isn't it? But like Maria behind the wheel of Sherman's Mercedes, we should watch where we're going or we're going to get in trouble.

But I like to think that interpretation is the frisky wild animal. And Wolfe's prose is a frisky wild animal (and a violently lurching animal). Look what's going on in that sentence. We're in McCoy's mind, and he's been going over his story as he might recount it to the police or to his wife (Judy), and he sees what his problem is. The sentence begins with an attempt to fill in what was missing — how the 2 black youths were going to attack him — and he knows that's an interpretation he wants to impose to serve his interests, so he shifts to thinking about how he could get away with that, and he locks onto Maria. She'll back him up. It's all interpretation. With interpretation you can do... what you want, but what about that other person. She could back him up, but he doesn't know that she will. And the sentence ends with his realization that this woman — his lover — is someone he barely knows.

Sad for Sherman! But that's what you get when you cheat on your wife who's not sexy to you anymore because she is so familiar. You get someone you don't know, and the liberty you took is a horrible entanglement, all bound up with someone you never learned you could trust.