The Bonfire of the Vanities in a ’87 satirical novel by Tom Wolfe, where there is a drama about ambition, racism, social class, politics and greed in 1980s New York City, and centres on three main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant attorney Larry Kramer, and British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow. This novel was phenomenal success, and is often been called the quintessential novel of the ’80s.

Sherman McCoy, the central character 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 last years of the twentieth century, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. The Bonfire of the Vanities, there is a gallery of characters from Wall Street.,. where people in their thirties feel like small-fry if they’re not yet making a million per, to the real estates, where the aim is lower but the itch is just as virulent.

McCoy’s wife and his mistress, the young prosecutor for whom the McCoy case would be the answer to a prayer, the never do-well British journalist who needs such a case to save his career in America, the street-wise Irish lawyer who becomes McCoy’s only ally, and Reverend Bacon of Harlem, a master manipulator of public opinion. We see what happens when the criminal justice system-gorged with “the chow,” as the Bronx prosecutor calls the borough’s usual black and Latin felons- considers the prospect of being banded a prime cut like Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue.

Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Picador,  paperback £12.99, 720 pages.