Sound Commentary - Your Wise Guide to Audiobooks and Audio Book Reviews

Tom Wolfe might be surprised to visit the South Bronx these days. The old Yankee Stadium has closed now. Its new clone sits directly across from it on the opposite side of 161st Street. The old blue and orange New York State Department of Corrections vans are white with navy lettering and new and shiny. A state of the art 140,000 square foot building complex, much like an indoor judicial multi-court mall is next door to where Wolfe's hero, Sherman McCoy, got his first taste of the New York Criminal Justice system. But back on the Grand Concourse and 161st, atop a hill, the Bronx Supreme Courthouse reigns sedately, poised above the polyglot crowds that still teem all over the streets doing whatever comes naturally. The South Bronx continues to pulse with life and moves to a beat of its own. Cab drivers in Manhattan will claim not to know the way there and decline fares, as always. Uptown of 125th Street there are virtually no white faces on the D train. And Bronx County justice is ever the oxymoron.

"A Liberal," says Wolfe in his wickedly scathing send-up of urban class distinctions and the American criminal justice system "is a Conservative who has been arrested." And to prove that point, we get to know Sherman McCoy. A high-flying bond trader who privately sees himself as a Master of the Universe, Sherman boasts (not out loud, for it would be too crass) a decorator/socialite wife, a beautiful young daughter, a prestigious Park Avenue Manhattan address and a voluptuous young mistress. When the story opens, his only major concern is convincing his dog to go out despite the rain, as he needs an excuse that will take him out of the house and to his secret love nest. But his secure and privileged world crumbles one day when, returning with his mistress from the airport in his Mercedes, he ends up unexpectedly in the Bronx, and ultimately becomes a defendant in a hit and run accident that turns into a heavily politicized homicide case.

If you saw the movie and liked it, listen to this audiobook, which is a thousand times better. If you didn't like the movie, listen to the audiobook anyway, as it's barely the same story. Wolfe did his homework. His observations on the Manhattan social and cultural scene are viciously funny. (Who else would have come up with the term "social x-rays" to describe those face-lifted, lipo-suctioned, starved to perfection, 40+ women of the New York Times' Society pages?) The transformation of a Master of the Universe into the Great White Defendant is bitterly comic and spot-on. Wolfe knows how to write. He knows his politics. He knows his media.  And he knows his Bronx, even the places where most of us would never stray. Reader Joe Barrett gives distinct voices and accents to a huge cast of disparate multi-ethnic and multi-racial characters, both upscale and down. He's having fun. Readers will too. Between Wolfe and Barrett this audiobook comes so alive that you can literally smell the inside of the arraignment pens in Bronx Criminal Court.  No mean feat, I can assure you.

Wolfe, Tom. The Bonfire of the Vanities. Read by Joe Barrett. 22 compact disks. 26 hrs. 30 mins. 2009. Blackstone Audio. 978-1-433-28841-8. $140 *SA

By Francine Levitov

Francine Levitov was a high school English teacher and had a second career in law as a New York public defense attorney before discovering audiobooks. Now in her third professional reincarnation, she is a former KLIATT audiobook reviewer and, along with Jean Palmer, a founding co-editor of SoundCommentary.com.