The Bonfire of the Vanities: A NovelSherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic