Judges described Wolfe's prose as "ghastly and boring".
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I personally hated Wolfe's writing so much, that after I finished Bonfire, I nailed it to a board and put it on my back porch to rot in the sun and rain. It stayed there from its birth in the Reagan years to perhaps the middle Clinton period, its racid prose stubbornly resisting time and weather under the horridly putrescent covers. At long last the lurid colors faded into an illegible gray brown that resembled dessicated flesh, as the nails rusted in place on the cracked board.
One evening during its long sojourn on the porch, some program on tv had an interview with Tom Wolfe. It could have been Sixty Minutes or it could have been one of Bill Moyer's occasional gigs. While I was listening to Wolfe's overly precious and self-consciously obnoxious chatter, I remembered the book nailed to the board and brought it in to watch the interview with me. We glowered at the tube together. After the completely empty interview, I took the book over to the sink and ran some tap water over it to freshen it up a bit, then put it back outside again.
Over the years, I occasionally thought about the book. I gave it a passing glance about once a week when I emptied the trash. Every once in a great while someone would notice it on my porch, since it had a prominence of place in its setting among the miscellanea of brooms, mops, and paper shopping bags I keep to line the garbage bucket under my kitchen sink.
``What's this?'' a visitor would ask.
``Oh, that's Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities,'' I would reply, not very cleverly.
Some of my more literary friends would laugh. Others would just shrug their shoulders, thinking I had gone off again.
At long last, perhaps a few more seasons into the 90s after the 80s had lost some their sour light, I threw it out while cleaning off the porch in preparation for painting.
I regret throwing it out, now. It could have been refurbished for our new century. Although, I would have been tempted to douse it in lighter fluid and burn it a little for Ronald Reagan's state funeral. But many other events since 2000 would have tempted me to abuse it.
Perhaps it wouldn't have lasted very much longer anyway.
CG