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F I N A N C E: Remembering Tom Wolfe
F I N A N C E: Remembering Tom Wolfe
F I N A N C E: Remembering Tom Wolfe
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Remembering
Tom Wolfe F
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● His novels captured the spirit one to look at the victors—the “Masters of the
Universe”—like Sherman McCoy, who sold bonds
of Wall Street’s extraordinary for a living. Bonfire drills into their lives, their
new Gilded Age. The mystery is hangups and petty ambitions, enumerating their
why so few have emulated him virtues and vices often literally (saying how much
their clothes, apartments, and lunches cost).
Looking back, especially through the harsh
lens of the 2008 financial crisis, it’s strange how
There are many reasons to praise Tom Wolfe, both sympathetic Wolfe was to Sherman McCoy. This
as a novelist and as a journalist. If Charles Dickens is a r elative judgment: We first meet Sherman
defined Victorian London, then the capital of the kneeling on the floor pathetically trying to put
world, Wolfe, who died on May 14 at 88, held up a leash on a dachshund, and Wolfe skewers the
a similar mirror to modern America—and New bond trader’s insecurities about “going broke on
York in particular. One of Wolfe’s less celebrated $1 million a year”—just as he savages the “social
achievements was that he was a great novelist X-rays” and freeloading English journalists. But
of finance—the only one that this frenzied era of as that implies, it’s equal-opportunity skewering.
moneymaking has produced. McCoy is a much more nuanced character than,
The Bonfire of the Vanities was arguably the first say, Augustus Melmotte, the villainous French
PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY/ISTOCK
great financial novel since Anthony Trollope’s The antihero of The Way We Live Now (which Trollope
May 21, 2018
Way We Live Now. Many eminent American writ- partly based on the Crédit Mobilier scandal), let
ers have looked at the victims of Wall Street and alone the c artoonish Gordon Gekko in Oliver Edited by
Pat Regnier
broader capitalism, including Sinclair Lewis and Stone’s Wall Street.
John Steinbeck. But Wolfe was the first American Wolfe spent time on trading floors, tried to Businessweek.com
◼ FINANCE Bloomberg Businessweek May 21, 2018
explain the excitement of the deal—and the Easton Ellis to Jonathan Franzen have looked at
all-American sorts who greedily and weakly end the consequences of this new Gilded Age—in the
up being swept away by it. He gave Charlie Croker, same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the
the Atlanta real estate developer in A Man in Full, a vanities of the previous epoch. But American fic-
similarly rounded treatment. tion has not followed Wolfe onto the trading floor,
In some ways the remarkable thing is not that not dived into the mechanics of money and its
Wolfe wrote about finance in this fashion but that effect on society, in the same way that Dickens
so few people have followed him. Out of all the and Victor Hugo did in a different age.
amazing things that have happened to America The best books about modern finance have
in the past half-century, the rise of Wall Street— been nonfiction—like Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker
and the creation of wealth through what Trollope and The Big Short. All our lives have been shaped ● The first-edition cover
of Bonfire
called “the manufacturing of shares”—is one of the by finance and economics, and yet hardly any-
most incredible. And yet what great fiction is there one has found a way to use fiction as a vehicle to
to catalog this era? explore these things. Whatever you think, Wolfe
Some would point to the TV show Billions, leaves a big space behind him. �John Micklethwait
which looks at hedge funds. And some would
THE BOTTOM LINE Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities was the
say that John Lanchester’s Capital was a British first great financial novel since Trollope’s The Way We Live Now,
Bonfire. Modern American writers from Bret providing a biting view of the “Masters of the Universe.”
Harassment at the
Broker’s Office
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● Top producers have
power over part of their
assistants’ pay