He has an infallible, mocking ear for New York voices, rendering with equal precision the defense lawyer's ''gedoutdahere,'' the deliberate bad grammar (``that don't help matters'') of the wily ``reverend'' and the clenched-teeth WASP locution (`howjado''). two detectivesone Irish, the other Jewish a slimy, alcoholic British journalist an outraged judge, etc. Wolfe adroitly swings his focus from one to another of the people involved: the protagonist McCoy Kramer, the assistant D.A. The incident is inflated by a manipulative black leader, a district attorney seeking reelection and a sleazy tabloid reporter into a full-blown scandal, a political football and a hokey morality play. On a clandestine date with his mistress one night, top Wall Street investment banker and snobbish WASP Sherman McCoy misses his turn on the thruway and gets lost in the South Bronx his Mercedes hits and seriously injures a young black man.

Ranging from the rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue to the dingy courtrooms of the Bronx, this is a totally credible tale of how the communities uneasily coexist and what happens when they collide. Both his cynical irony and sense of the ridiculous are perfectly suited to his subject: the roiling, corrupt, savage, ethnic melting pot that is New York City. In his spellbinding first novel, Wolfe proves that he has the right stuff to write propulsively engrossing fiction.

The bonfire of the vanities novel