A WOLFE at the Door

This month's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's second novel, reminds us that the author lit more than one bonfire.

- JOSH ZAJDMAN

As literary conflagrations go, not even Dido's funeral pyre can compete with Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, the 1987 megawatt best-seller, which expanded the playing field for Wolfe, who until then had been best known as a journalist. Like Zola a century before, Wolfe treated the novel as a kind of social document, a reflection of an age.