I'd immediately recommend Bonfire of the Vanities. It perfectly captures NYC in the 80s: the racial divides, the wealth inequality, and the many ways individuals cross race and class lines. And his vivid description of how bond traders make insane amounts of money (for the time) is unforgettable.
Frankly, Bonfire is worth reading just for unforgettable lines like this one: "If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested."
Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" (Going broke on a million a year), p.137
"One breath of scandal, and not only would the Giscard scheme collapse but his very career would be finished! And what would he do then? I’m already going broke on a million a year! The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had to take out to buy the apartment... Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fee… $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes. Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent..."
Yeah. I’m honestly not sure how well a newbie read from a space of 30 years who knows Lille of eighties NYC would stand up. But, from my perspective as someone who lived briefly in 80s Manhattan, it’s his novel that really captures a time and place.
I don't remember much of Bonfire, but I definitely remember a specific paragraph in which almost every noun and verb was preceded by the adjective 'f*ing'. Very vivid yet puzzling for a young kid.
I read "Bonfire of the Vanities" many years ago, and thought it was fantastic -- does an incredible job of portraying the different social/ethnic/economic groups in New York during the 1980's, and how these groups view, think about, and interact with each other. Hollywood turned the book into a terrible movie that ruins the story; I would avoid the movie if you have any interest in reading the book.
My recommendation would be to read the book, then read the book "The Devil's Candy", which is about the making of the film, and then see the movie.
The Devil's Candy is about how a writer was given full, uncensored access to the production from inception to release, because everyone thought it was going to be a puff piece of a book about how great everyone was. But in reality, the author got to see how a combination of creative egos and studio mismanagement (plus bad casting, a compromised script, I mean, EVERYTHING) created one of the biggest hollywood flops to that point. It's such a good read.
Second "The Devil's Candy," even if you're not interested in Bonfire of the Vanities at all.
I haven't read the book or seen the movie (yet) but The Devil's Candy was an incredible look into how badly things can go in Hollywood. You can probably generalize it to any large project where multiple competing interests all have a stake.
It's very funny and engaging, but I first read it young enough that I still expected that kind of story to include some kind of redemption and turn-around— in reality the characters (esp Sherman) basically spend the whole time making a bad situation worse and worse and worse, continuing to double down on their mistakes and ultimately bury themselves.
Not that this is at all bad, but it was a change from what I was otherwise used to reading as a teenager.
>Hollywood turned the book into a terrible movie that ruins the story; I would avoid the movie if you have any interest in reading the book.
I saw the movie when it first came out but never read the book. I thought the movie was good and couldn't understand why it got so many bad reviews. What made the book so much better?
I can't speak to either the movie or the book, but I've found it interesting that whenever I see a movie before reading the source, I'm pretty happy with the movie, but rarely am I satisfied with the movie when I've read the book first.
The subtle nuances and key moments that I love are rarely translated to the screen. It's perfectly understandable, because they're two very different forms of fiction and the movie rarely has time to be much more than the Cliff's Notes version, but it's still disappointing.
When I've seen the movie first, I can appreciate it for its own sake.
One I remember rather well was the last Harry Potter movie. I had read the book a few years earlier when it was released. I was it a first time in a cinema and was rather disappointed, compared to the experience of reading this part of the book. But then I saw it again one month later and, expecting the movie instead of the book, had a much better time.
The book was brilliantly written and really captured a time and place. The movie was just meh.
Maybe, absent a book, the movie was just mostly forgettable. There were better films involving 80s financial types like Wall Street. But we’d probably remember Bonfire as a minor film that largely wasted star power through miscasting etc. rather than a bomb.
Another vote for this one. Also Chuck Yeager is the most badass pilot that ever piloted anything that flies. They also made a movie out of the book. It's decent but the book is amazing.
Second the recommendations. However for a counterpoint on Yeager’s role in the NF-104 crash described at the end of the book, see this account from a trainer involved in the program: http://www.kalimera.org/nf104/stories/stories_12.html
"The facts are clear. Chuck Yeager proved incapable of doing the job. He was totally outside his element. He was a natural pilot who had learned by experience and feel, but never really understood stability, just ‘sensed’ how airplanes would act, but aerodynamics and space dynamics are night and day. If he was to fail, I expected it to be outside the aerodynamics region.
But not even that can excuse his accident, which was his fault, alone and was an error of bad pilot technique during normal, aerodynamic flight. His shortcoming was inability to gain and maintain the 70 degree climb angle. That required strict and delicate airplane control. No more and no less."
> it makes The Right Stuff seem like an amateur hour aviation book
I doubt that.
The Right Stuff is not simply a book about Yeager. And while Yeager is a fascinating and exciting man and truly a hero, Tom Wolfe is one of the greatest non-fiction stylists of the twentieth century. I would be very surprised if Chuck Yeager could write, or commission a ghost writer, with one tenth the chops of Tom Wolfe.
As a person interested in aviation (and a good story), 'Yeager' is my favorite. The Right Stuff was a good experience, but I probably won't re-read it again.
Yes, for tech readers, The Right Stuff will be disappointing, it covers how people feel and the politics, not much about the technical side of the Mercury or X-1, X-2 or x-15 programs.
I might start with 'The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby' which is a collection of his essays. The first chapter of 'The Right Stuff' is worth reading by itself. The rest of the book is fascinating but drags on a bit in the last third. My favorite is 'The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test'. I haven't gotten around to reading 'Bonfire of the Vanities' however so I can't really comment on that.
'The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby' absolutely blew me away as kid in the UK - tremendous verve in Wolfe's writing, wonderfully descriptive and illuminating and contributed not insignificantly to my life long love of car culture...
I agree with Calrbolite103, a very accessible starting point to Wolfe's style in short chapter/article/stories. Most of what he wrote was great IMO, most especially about the late 60's to the 80's...
I agree, this is a great starting point. It contains a selection of articles on such diverse subjects as hot rods, Phil Spector, insomnia-inducing Las Vegas, NASCAR (and moonshining), 60s dance crazes (the mashed potato, etc), The Beatles landing at JFK, Cary Grant, Muhammad Ali, Nannies in NYC, and suits with real buttonholes. All are fantastic reads.
I could never read through the passage about the arrival of the daishiki chieftain and his entourage at San Francisco City Hall without getting a side stitch, teary eyes, and a runny nose from laughing out loud.
I disliked "Bonfire of the Vanities" because it was clear to me that Wolfe had fallen into self-plagiarism. It felt to me that the same fate befell Hunter Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut. It didn't take away the pleasure of reading their earlier works, but prompted me to look for different voices.
'A Man in Full' and 'I am Charolette Simmons' are two of my favorites. I picked up 'Kingdom of Speech' last year, but couldn't get into it. The other two though will keep you up at night. Great writing.
I'm genuinely curious myself. What little I've read of it made it seem like a sensationalized account of how young women in college are imagined to behave, as per an out-of-touch old man.
He supposedly did a lot of research on just how the hook-up culture on campuses worked. (Don't mean that cynically or suggestively--just that he always worked hard for his source material.)
I read this while in college, and it was, well, horrible. The characters were terrible and unbelievable. Maybe 50 years on it will be something of a good intro to college life in the 2000s, but I disliked it.
It depends on what you like, but having read all his full length books, I’m firmly of the opinion that A Man in Full is the best novel qua novel. In terms of craftsmenship it’s his masterpiece. On the other hand, Bonfire of the Vanities is the most Wolfian of the books—it’s the book that most of any of them could not have been written by anyone else (with honorable mention to Back to Blood).
I've only read Bonfire of the Vanities but it's a great taste of the conflicts and tensions brewing in 1980s New York. Unfortunately seems relevant today to explain the President's world view.
My under the radar favorite Tom Wolfe book is I am Charlotte Simmons. Maybe it just resonated with me since I read it going in college but I'd definitely recommend it!
Frankly, Bonfire is worth reading just for unforgettable lines like this one: "If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested."