Tom Wolfe gone. For years I thought Bonfire of the Vanities to be an unsurpassable

[Burney]

You didn't think Bonfire was a masterpiece? Stick to hammering your bellend in that allotment shed.

No. I thought it was yet another self-conscious attempt at 'THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL' and - like most such attempts - overblown, grandiose and with a positively chasmic discrepancy between reach and grasp.