SSSSSSSSSSsssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh......

The sound of pages turning, 659 leaves rustling. The 659 pages of Tom Wolfe's first novel. The Bonfire of the Vanities. Have to finish this chapter. The next. And then it explodes. Fingers are flying. A blur. The End of The Book.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

By Tom Wolfe

Farrar, Straus, Giroux

$19.95 659 PP.

TOM Wolfe is at his best as a writer whose task is to capture the sounds and superficial preoccupations of today's New York. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, he sets out to chronicle The City in its multi-colored glory; Wolfe's book has the novelistic ambition of a Dickens.

But the book, which is the first novel by the prolific creator of the New Journalism school of writing, is ultimately a story of character, not plot. While the scope of Bonfire is as disparate as the five boroughs, the themes are precise: personal ambition, egotism--Vanity.

Power and those it attracts are the subjects of Wolfe's novel. And Sherman McCoy is at the heart of it all--the axis of a limited world, the universe of social New York. The world where $1 million a year is barely enough income and the Co-op board has more control over your life than the police.

McCoy, as he reminds himself over and over, is The Master of the Universe. The top bond trader for a prestigious Wall Street firm, Sherman McCoy wears his invincibility in the form of cashmere overcoats and tailored suits. His Park Avenue apartment, and even his social-climbing wife, are all marks of his Master status.

To dominate at will is to be a Master of the Universe, according to Wolfe the pharse-maker. Masters of the Universe are the ultimate egotists, absorbed in the pursuit of a power that supercedes dollar values. In a way that differentiates him from his old-line WASP father, McCoy is a patrician with an all-consuming greed. Not merely to be rich, but to be the richest. The most. For as McCoy knows, it's not the money, but the control that he seeks on the trading floor, in his 20-room apartment, in the pied-a-terre of his mistress.

Yet power, as the truism goes, has its limits. In the concentric worlds that comprise modern New York, a character like Sherman McCoy is impotent should he venture beyond the insularity of chauffeur-driven cars and prepschool networks. Away from Wall Street, McCoy's life becomes the grist for other New York types, each one consumed by a drive for power. The gallery that Wolfe presents is compelling and yet predictable--his types are compiled from the people profiled in New York Magazine, Manhattan, Inc. and page six of the New York Post.

WOLFE presents these New Yorkers in their full, frightening shallowness. There is Peter Fallow, the British journalist/alcoholic in search of the big story that will pay for his drinking bouts. And Larry Kramer, the disillusioned Bronx assistant district attorney, hoping always for the big case that will earn him a promotion. And finally the Reverend Bacon, a Black Machiavelli who barters racial fury for craven ends.

But if Wolfe's choice of characters holds no surprises--although, to be fair, it is rare for any bestselling author to make these people his topic--for the reader, his execution is superb. Wolfe's journalistic style translates exceptionally well to the novelistic form. The story itself is punctuated with staccato syllables and stream of consciousness musings. Wolfe communicates with the reader on a sensory level that subsumes traditional language. The chapter called "The King of the Jungle," begins with this onomonopaeic passage:

"Thumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpat humpathumpa--the noise of the airliners taking off pounded so hard, he could feel it."