“But you don’t live in that jungle, Sherman, and you never have. You know what’s in that jungle? People who are all the time crossing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side, from this side to the other side. You don’t know what that’s like. You had a good upbringing. Laws weren’t any kind of a threat to you. They were your laws, Sherman, people like you and your family’s. Well, I didn’t grow up that way. We were always staggering back and forth across the line, like a buncha drunks, and so I know and it doesn’t frighten me. And let me tell you something else. Right there on the line everybody’s an animal—the police, the judges, the criminals, everybody.”Our main character Sherman is getting lectured by his mistress and accidental partner in crime Maria.
February 24, 2019
"People who are all the time crossing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side, from this side to the other side."
For the new installment of the "Bonfire" project — where we're reading passages from Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" — I offer this, from Kindle Location 4,662:
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38 comments:
A very third world attitude, and in that context very realistic.
The law is an imposition by some people who don't like you much, or an arbitrary obstacle and risk to your activities. Like the perils of the sea, to a sailor.
In and out, in and out, in and out would be the sex scene, then.
Tom Wolfe: "If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested."
Some people assume that wealthier, educated people are more sophisticated, and know more about the law and their rights than the poor and uneducated. That may be true in many ways, but many of them lack firsthand experience and street smarts, and like Sherman, often don't have their guard up when they should.
On the other hand, I've seen TV shows like "Live PD: Police Patrol", "Cops", and others like them, and one thing that jumps out about criminals is their astounding stupidity. They often INVITE police to search their cars, either by suspicious behavior that amounts to probable cause, or even by needlessly and stupidly consenting to a search.
It took awhile for Sherman to wise up, and lawyer up, but SPOILER ALERT, he did.
it needs to be remembered that Sherman McCoy is a wall street banker who is INDIFFERENT to the way NYC is being governed. He simply doesn't care about crime, racial prejudice, poverty or anything else because he's INSULATED. iow, he's your typical 'fuck you jack, i'm all right' libertarian.
It only when he's confronted - personally - with real life in NYC, that he starts to change his thinking.
buwaya said...A very third world attitude, and in that context very realistic.
New York City is a third-world country. I'm not being snarky. I lived there for 17 years and I mean it in a very real sense. NYC is run like a third-world country.
Char Char Binks said...It took awhile for Sherman to wise up, and lawyer up, but SPOILER ALERT, he did.
Well, he lawyered up. Until he ran out of money.
The whole novel can be read as WASPy Tom Wolfe attacking people like Sherman McCoy for having a "Who gives a damn, I'm doing OK" attitude toward the situation in NYC - and by extension the USA.
Its probably one reason why Mailer and Updike and hated the Novel so much.
"New York City is a third-world country"
No. NYC is perfect example of "diversity" in action. You vote with your ethnic group and everything else is secondary. The USA is becoming NYC writ large. California is already there. Just get enough blacks/hispanics/Tammany hall Irish/whoever to vote Democrat and buy them off, and you can do what you want. Just hand out the graft.
I'm reading the the book for a second time. I remember I thought it was very far-fetched and humorous before. Now I see it as realistic and, in the same measure, unfunny. The fall of a rich man due to some small error - the future mayor pushed SEND TO ALL, the billionaire strayed into a police prostitution sting - that's commonplace these days. Not wildly preposterously entertaining. Dreary. Boring. Why write a long book, why not just have your character rent a U-Haul like everyone else and start the story there? The other striking thing about this book from the Eighties is the way in which present-day attitudes which I was attributing to the rise of deconstructionism and critical realism and so on are shown to be embedded in the life of the past, in past life as lived in NYC, anyhow. I should have known that nothing in America is due to obscure French writers or Continental philosophers or moralizing yada yadas. That's like saying that cow farts are causing global warming.
Well, he lawyered up. Until he ran out of money.
~ Robin Hall...
Lawyers believe a person is innocent until proven broke.
AA wrote, "accidental partner in crime Maria"
Up to this point, finding Sherman and Maria discussing what should be done going forward, there has been no crime on their part. Hitting the boy on the ramp wasn't a crime. To the contrary they were trying to extricate themselves from being the victims of a robbery attempt during which that boy, who was himself one of the robbers, was accidentally hit.
Going forward they might be partners in crime for failing to report the accident. But even then that might not be a crime since they didn't know for a fact that there had been a bodily injury. Sherman suspected it, but didn't know it.
Its hilarious to think the novel could've been written about Donald Trump and Maples.
If things had gone wrong.
Of course it would never would've been written about Jeffry Epstein. He just would've hired alan what-a-shit and bribed everyone and gotten off with a $20 fine.
I agree that under the circumstances it is not clear that Sherman and Maria have committed a crime until they know they hit someone (though of course, maybe they actually did already know they hit someone), but all of the other strands of the story are converging in such a way that none of that matters much. It looks like tragedy is heading Sherman's way. Maria's approach is not a crazy one. Law of the jungle, self defense, defense of necessity, the various powers that are going to be coming for Sherman with only a tenuous connection to justice. The law in practice is itself going to be "crossing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side . . ."
Bonfire of the swine is one of the world's seven sumptuous sweets.
rcocean said...
Its hilarious to think the novel could've been written about Donald Trump and Maples.
If things had gone wrong.
Trump would have stopped, taken the kid to the hospital in his limo, paid all the bills and offered the entire gang and their families college educations, affordable housing and well paying jobs.
I thought that bit was particularly good. It captures one real difference that exists between people.
Tom Wolfe was a reporter--observant, entertaining, witty, cruel, ruthless, with a sharp ear for self-delusion. He had a willingness to look beyond the obvious, the self-serving pieties that let fortunate people feel good about themselves. The "Me" Decade, which preceded "Bonfire", is a killer piece of social commentary.
Maria in Bonfire is a classic type--the beautiful, frisky girl who is no better than she should be. The only way she was ever going to get anywhere was to take her opportunities when they came along--and she took them. Think about Louise Brooks in early films in Hollywood and in Europe (For an extra bonus, go to the Louise Brooks page in Wikipedia and look at the sophomore picture from her high school yearbook.) Wolfe is probably thinking of Louise Brooks when he describes Maria as having black, bobbed hair.
So what about this passage? What is Maria talking about? Did her family rob banks? Did they steal from the cash drawer? Did the children steal from other children? Did they drive drunk? Did they sell drugs? Did they prostitute themselves or their children? Did they lie to the police? We don't know because Wolfe doesn't tell us, so we imagine. Maria's family probably did some of those things, right? Becky Sharpe famously says in Vanity Fair, "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year." Maria is someone who is not trying to be a good woman. But Sherman is putting his fate and his future in the hands of someone who is not trying to be good. This cannot turn out well if Wolfe is trying for social realism, which he said he was.
The first time I read this book (and remember that Sherman, Althouse, and I are about the same age) I thought it was funny, witty, and brilliant satire. Now, 30 years later, on a second reading, I still think it is witty, but I find it realistic rather than satiric. I am not finding it funny--sharply observed, yes, but not funny. Maria's little speech about where she comes from should break Sherman's heart.
They is no end to the number of sadistic hunters who enjoy killing pigs. What a reason to build a border wall. It may be an excuse. Birth control methods may work - on redneck hunters, and wild pigs.
Trumpit--that's a non-sequitur. I think you want the next post down, the one about the Danish border fence.
Strangely, your comment does apply to the later chapters of The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Actually no, McCoy still prides himself as a,social liberal, he reminds the wife of when they did the black power salute at yale and Wellesley. Now Maria is not like at all like melanie Griffith shes like Saldana of guardians of the galaxy.
I'm reminded of an echo in bonfire with the end of Gatsby, where the title character becomes the victim of those earlier masters of the universe, Tom and daisy Buchanan.
The great Gatsby was based on the mills double murder case of the 20s, whereas bonfire was a milieu type experience,
One of the interesting comparison times with bonfire where money and adultery make for intersting situations in Nelson demilles gold coast which one might call bonfire meets the godfather.
Wasnt Maria married to Arthur ruskin the Jewish air charter tycoon to the arabs
" We were always staggering back and forth across the line, like a buncha drunks, and so I know and it doesn’t frighten me."
Well, that's the problem, right there. You can cross the line once, twice, fifty times. You could cross it a hundred times, except that the 57th time you cross it ....
She was Narciso!
Did anybody else here read the Rolling Stone series besides me?
Hmmm...this brought a bit of dialogue between to mind Madame Olenska and Newland Archer to mind:
Age of Innocence, Book II XXIX, paragraph 57:
“I want—I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that—categories like that—won’t exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.”
She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. “Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?” she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: “I know so many who’ve tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo—and it wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous.”
Wharton, like Wolfe, was a shrewd observer of the mores and conventions of her times, and the contradictions therein.
The more things change the more they stay the same, no?
I think Wolfe was thinking of a modern day version of Gatsby, now carraway was the bond trader, Buchanans were the old money fortunes
donald said...
Did anybody else here read the Rolling Stone series besides me?
I haven't read the Rolling Stone since 1969.
Wolfe has had this knack of capturing the ethos of any environs whether its thr Oakland welfare office, the benefit party for the Panthers, the secret lives of the astronauts, bond traders and real estate developers
narciso said...
"Wolfe has had this knack of capturing the ethos of any environs whether its thr Oakland welfare office, the benefit party for the Panthers, the secret lives of the astronauts, bond traders and real estate developers"
Wolfe understood that we all dangle perilously above a boiling sea of nightmares, clawing our way up a tenuous thread of impossible dreams. But what beautiful dreams they are!
Dum da dum. Back and forth 3 times. 3 quarters self portrait. She's keeping something in the shadows.
rcocean said...
"New York City is a third-world country"
No. NYC is perfect example of "diversity" in action. You vote with your ethnic group and everything else is secondary.
That’s not an example for how NYC is not a third-world country, it’s an example of how it is.
My great grandfather was a judge in a western mining town. At it's height he was a high up figure in the local political machine. During prohibition the local bootleggers stills were just over the hill from the family cabin. Not pure coincidence by any means. Unlike Sherman he started out working in the mines before heading East for law school. I'm guessing he's be shrewd enough to understand that he could trust Maria as far as he could throw her.
"I'm guessing he'd [sic] be shrewd enough to understand that he could trust Maria as far as he could throw her."
Your great grandfather was shrewd. Sherman, not so much.
SPOILER ALERT:
When Sherman finally lawyers up, he doesn't want to hear anything insulting about Maria. She's his ace in the hole. After all, she was driving.
That should work, right? Where is that witness? That other guy that Sherman thought was trying to rob them. He'll tell the truth, right? Or Maria will. Because this is a realistic novel, right? And the truth has to come out at the end, just like it does in real life.
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