The Haves and the Have-Mores THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES by Tom Wolfe; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 659 pages; $19.95

By R.Z. Sheppard

"This is the decade of plutography," says Tom Wolfe, author of such fireproof phrases as "radical chic" to describe affluent activists of the '60s and "the Me decade" to define the narcissistic '70s. Plutography is to money what pornography is to sex, explains the 56-year-old pioneer of the New Journalism, emphasizing that "today it is impossible to be too ostentatious." In Manhattan, where Wolfe and his wife, daughter and son occupy a four-story town house in the coveted East 60s, he notes that one of the latest examples of conspicuous display is the stretch limousines lined up in front of what he calls "this week's restaurant of the century." Inside these land yachts, the young and newly rich slurp drinks while waiting for their names to be announced for the next available table. The highest status will be conferred on the toff who gets embraced by the restaurant's owner.

Wolfe has been chronicling the behavior of the city's haves and have-mores since 1962, when he joined the New York Herald Tribune as a general-assignment reporter and quickly became the main attraction of the newspaper's Sunday magazine supplement. His timing, like his trademark white suit, was impeccable and dramatic. After two-stepping through the Eisenhower era, America was ready to rock 'n' roll. Wolfe covered the arrival of the Beatles for their first U.S. tour and caught the moment with a description of hysterical fans throbbing like alien protoplasm against the plate glass of the airport waiting room. The story stretched conventional journalistic license, but few readers could deny that this brightly tailored, soft-spoken Virginian was up to something new.

His later magazine pieces about Southern stock-car racing, California auto customizers, Manhattan's Pop art world, funky fashions and the navel engagements of the self-awareness movement confirmed Wolfe's originality. Unlike the reigning intellectuals of the day, he took American mass culture at face value, though not with a straight face. His New Journalism combined the skills and stamina of an ace reporter with the techniques of fiction, and it reached its peak in The Right Stuff, the 1979 recounting of the lives and times of the Mercury astronauts.

To call The Bonfire of the Vanities Wolfe's first novel is to make a distinction without too much difference. The ingeniously rigged plot is clearly fictional, but the details of New York City life, high and low, leap from the legman's notebook. The novel first appeared in Rolling Stone four years ago and ran in 27 installments. Since then, Wolfe has thoroughly rewritten it. The crucial change was to make the leading character a Wall Street broker (pre Black Monday) instead of a writer. "Writers are not much affected by scandal," says the author, "but bond salesmen can be ruined." Moreover, the alteration meant that Wolfe had to study the breed in its habitat, to examine its plumage, to listen to the roar of "well-educated young white men baying for money." In short, New Journalism shares much with the traditional novel of manners and society. "Realism is a plateau from which literature cannot back down," says Wolfe, acknowledging his debt to Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens and Evelyn Waugh.

Like these predecessors, Wolfe is a master of social satire; he is, in fact, the best of his generation. Bonfire is merciless and unrelenting in its depiction of New York as a city driven by ethnic and racial hostility, political ambition and status. What of idealism, ethics and refined impulses? In the words of one fulsome character, "fuhgedaboudit." Action is motivated by the seven deadly sins, distributed evenhandedly among the city's blacks, Irish, Jews and that overlooked minority, the rich Wasps.

Wolfe's main conceit is that the upper classes are especially vulnerable to prejudicial treatment if they lose their insulation. Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue and Southampton, the leading bond salesman at Pierce & Pierce, learns this harsh lesson when he is arrested for hit-and-run driving and plummets from a "Master of the Universe" to "the Great White Defendant," the dream of every ambitious $36,000-a-year assistant district attorney.

Middle-aged married female readers will be unsympathetic and even gleeful about Sherman's downfall. He is driving his young mistress Maria Ruskin home from Kennedy International Airport and feeling on top of the world when he mistakenly turns off the highway and gets lost in the South Bronx. There is a confrontation with two black youths, a scuffle, a hasty escape with the girlfriend now behind the wheel of his black Mercedes sports car. There is also a suspicious thok! against the car.

Maria, a bed-wise South Carolina belle and wife of an aging Jewish businessman who has made a fortune selling charter flights to Mecca-bound Arabs, discourages Sherman from reporting the incident to the police. Unfortunately, the mother of the badly injured boy is a friend of the Rev. Reginald Bacon's, whose specialty is political pressure and misappropriating social-service funds for his private use, an activity he justifies as "steam control." Bacon is shrewd, cunning, outrageous and, like the other shrewd, cunning, outrageous characters in Bonfire, not necessarily bigger than life.

Wolfe will most likely be denounced for creating comic characters who accurately reflect familiar and self-important fixtures in New York life. At the top of the heap are "social X rays," rumpless women of a certain age who believe one cannot be too rich or too thin. Sixtyish men of this stratum are frequently accompanied by "lemon tarts," sleek, young blonds. Sherman McCoy is a decent well-bred sort, neither more nor less lustful than most confident 38-year-old males and particularly amusing when he gives facts and figures about how one can go broke in Manhattan on $1 million a year.

In the middle class is a Hasidic landlord who bugs his rent-controlled apartments in the hope that he can learn of a violation that will enable him to evict low-paying tenants. Peter Fallow, the boozy London-expatriate reporter for Manhattan's British-owned tabloid the City Light, is a major contribution to the literature of journalistic sleaze. Lawrence Kramer, an assistant district attorney in the Bronx, exudes the resentment of a young man who has to live in a small, narrow, $888-a-month apartment ("a slot") with his wife, new baby and nurse (paid for by his mother-in-law). The underclass is represented mainly by ghetto felons: armed robbers who list their occupations as "security guards" and young drug pushers who have mastered "the Pimp Roll," a swaggering gait not uncommon on the city's streets.

Wolfe's heroes are men who can be reckless in their commitments to professionalism, another name for courage. He has admired these types before, most fully in his portrait of Test Pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, the type is represented by a feisty old Jewish judge, an Irish criminal lawyer and an Irish investigator for the D.A.'s office. Wolfe pays conditional tribute to what he identifies as Celtic machismo, a refusal to back off from confrontations, and passes on the street theory that regardless of race or background, all members of the New York City police department eventually become Irish.

The provocations of Bonfire are not gratuitous. They are embedded in convincing contexts and experienced through the eyes, ears and nerve endings of the characters. This technique is what makes Wolfe's journalism so vital and gives him authority as a novelist. This, and his ability to handle an imaginative and intricate plot that welds his descriptions of dinner parties, restaurant games, Wall Street trading and courthouse chaos into more than a tour de force. Even at more than 600 pages, Bonfire moves with a swift comic logic. It has become a critical cliche to say that a book is hard to put down. Those who think that they can casually dip into this one, fuhgedaboudit.