Starting before the car accident, when he accidentally calls his wife instead of his mistress and unthinkingly uses the wrong name on the phone, his fall from grace begins slowly but rapidly accelerates as Fallow and Kramer close in on him. The other three main characters are also excellently drawn, all of them just as flawed in their own way as McCoy is – alcoholic English journalist Peter Fallow, who sees the case as an opportunity of a lifetime, Assistant DA Larry Kramer, who is trying to prosecute McCoy to impress his new girlfriend Shelly Thomas, and Reverend Bacon, a Harlem religious leader determined to use Lamb's case as a cause célèbre.īut while these three are compelling characters in their own right, as are a host of others such as McCoy's lawyer Tommy Killian and the irascible judge Kovitsky, Wolfe never spends too long on any of them before taking us back to McCoy and his rapid spiral downwards. Instead, it's the characters who are wonderfully memorable, especially the anti-hero Sherman, who is a pitiable character simply because he seems incapable of choosing the correct advice to take. However, while from my hazy background knowledge of this book, I was expecting a lot more about the machinations of Wall Street, I was surprised at how little a part McCoy's job plays in the novel.

I've read several of the non-fiction books about Wall Street in the 1980s, such as the superb Liar's Poker, and so the world of Sherman McCoy was immediately familiar to me. But when McCoy and his mistress Maria Ruskin end up lost in the Bronx, and an accident leads to Lamb being hit by McCoy's Mercedes, a chain of events start which will lead to his downfall. Under normal circumstances, it's clear that McCoy's world and Lamb's world would never overlap. Henry Lamb is a black student from the projects. He has a pleasant wife, a beautiful mistress, and a sweet six-year-old daughter. In his own mind, bond trader Sherman McCoy is a 'Master of the Universe'. Summary: Superb novel brilliantly satirises New York in the 80's, with a cast of compelling characters.

Tom wolfe books bonfire of the vanities