Negative Positive
Title: New York's Greatest Portrayal
Review: Tom Wolfe has a magical touch for breathing life into non-fiction, as in The Right Stuff, but in Bonfire of the Vanities, his skill as a novelist and a satirist is blatantly evident. This bleak and witty portrayal of New York life in the eighties is both hilarious and dark at the same time. Wolfe's characters represent the spectrum of human behavior, while his situations are riddled with ironies and paradoxes of truth about human existence. This book is most enjoyable, I would imagine, if you have at least some knowlege of New York, because much of its humor and depth stems from New York culture, but it is also true that New york is a micrchosm of american existence on a whole, so Bonfire of the Vanities may, in fact, be a universally American Novel. Whichever, it is worth reading if not only for the reason that it is funny, brilliantly written, and makes clear the fact that Tom Wolf's name belongs on the list of satirists that includes Jonathon Swift and Oscar Wilde.
Is the review positive or negative? 