He's a sort of carefully bred white rat in Dr. All he's got is adrenalin and fear, fear and adrenalin. He's all surface is Sherman, and when he blunders off the expressway into the welfare jungle of the South Bronx in his $48,000 Mercedes, into the biggest trouble of his heretofore charmed life, he is without reserves of experience, imagination or moral awareness with which to guide himself. He seems barely to know his decorative wife, his decorative daughter or his libidinous mistress, to say nothing of himself. He lives in the middle of New York City without knowing New York City. The novel relates the fall of Sherman McCoy, an investment banker making a million a year who seems blind to everything except appearances, sex and money. As well, he knows how to tell a story, and how to make us laugh, qualities not always present in the work of some of the more polished, more literary or ultimately more ambitious novelists of his generation. When he writes about process he knows what he is writing about, whether it's the Wall Street bond market, the Bronx District Attorney's Office, print and television journal-ism, or the working habits of sleazy lawyers -the man knows how to prepare and he knows how to research.

I read ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' straight through, in two sessions on two consecutive days, and enjoyed it enormously. What is amazing is that he gets away with it. Wolfe's strategy is to somehow batter the reader into submission, using an incantatory repetition of certain emblematic phrases, (HIS FIRST NOVEL!), detailed description of people's clothing, hyperbole, interior monologue whenever he feels like it, and various other New Journalism devices he is apparently too fond of to give up. As in much of his other work, such as ''The Right Stuff,'' Mr. Now comes Tom Wolfe, aging enfant terrible, with his first novel, (his first novel!), six hundred and fifty-nine pages of raw energy about New York City and various of its inhabitants - a big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let go.

Tom wolfe bonfire of the vanities book