‘Christ! It’s Judy! He’s dialled his own apartment! He’s aghast – paralysed! So he said: ‘May I speak to Maria, please?’ He fingered it must be her friend Germaine, the one she sublet the apartment from. Three rings and a woman’s voice: ‘Hello?’īut it was not Maria’s voice. He picks up the telephone and cradles it between his shoulder and his ear and fishes around in his pocket for a quarter and drops it in the slot and dials. Nothing seems to be going right for Sherman who after making a weak excuse to his wife to go out, tries to call Maria from the phone box to try to see her: Sherman is having an affair with a rich, ‘foxy’ lady, Maria and meets her in a seedy rent controlled apartment which she sublets. But Sherman is worried and feels guilty about everything, about under achieving, about overspending, about his wife who controls him. The story concerns a Wall Street bond salesman named Sherman Mc Coy, a Wasp who lives on Park Avenue, son of a Wall Street man, the Lion of Dunning Sponget, the epitome of entitled. In this widely painted story Wolfe takes us into the heart and motives of all of the main protagonists and nobody comes out of it smelling of roses. As Wolfe points out ‘Wasps were rare in the Bronx’, the Bronx which had been Irish was now run by the Jews, see the Mayors quote at the introduction, but the inhabitants, the electorate were now overwhelmingly Black or Hispanic. Reading Wolfe’s Bonfire is a deep dive into the 1980’s New York and in particular to the Bronx and Manhattan. There were only Jews, Irishmen and Italians in college, but he heard about them, and he learned that some of the most famous people in New York were this type of goyim, the Protestants, people like the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilt’s, The Roosevelt’s and the Astor’s, t he Morgans. He was in college before he realised there was this whole other set of goyim, the Protestants. Both were unpleasant, but the lineup was easy enough to comprehend. The Irish were stupid and liked to fight and inflict pain.

The C atholics were two types, the Irish and the Italians.

They didn’t even rate being called goyim. When he was growing up, the goyim were all Catholics, unless you counted the shvartzer, which nobody did.

He found the Christian churches baffling.

Thomas wolfe bonfire of the vanities