Word: mccoys
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...McCoy, as he reminds himself over and over, is The Master of the Universe. The top bond trader for a prestigious Wall Street firm, Sherman McCoy wears his invincibility in the form of cashmere overcoats and tailored suits. His Park Avenue apartment, and even his social-climbing wife, are all marks of his Master status...
...dominate at will is to be a Master of the Universe, according to Wolfe the pharse-maker. Masters of the Universe are the ultimate egotists, absorbed in the pursuit of a power that supercedes dollar values. In a way that differentiates him from his old-line WASP father, McCoy is a patrician with an all-consuming greed. Not merely to be rich, but to be the richest. The most. For as McCoy knows, it's not the money, but the control that he seeks on the trading floor, in his 20-room apartment, in the pied-a-terre...
...power, as the truism goes, has its limits. In the concentric worlds that comprise modern New York, a character like Sherman McCoy is impotent should he venture beyond the insularity of chauffeur-driven cars and prepschool networks. Away from Wall Street, McCoy's life becomes the grist for other New York types, each one consumed by a drive for power. The gallery that Wolfe presents is compelling and yet predictable--his types are compiled from the people profiled in New York Magazine, Manhattan, Inc. and page six of the New York Post...
...dynamic language speeds the plot along, even as the story line itself falters. McCoy's story is a conventional tale in which few of the characters surprise. As the result of a freak hit-and-run accident in Bronx, McCoy becomes embroiled in the farcical, gargantuan appartus of the municipal court system. And just as McCoy used people in his life to serve his own egotistical ends, so he in turn becomes the vehicle for power that Wolfe's other characters seek. McCoy is a tweedy sacrificial lamb, ritually slayed in a public forum...
...threads of the story come together at McCoy's trial--he is at once The Great White Defendant, The Big Story and The Political Boon. McCoy is dehumanized by the judicial process, and by the system that had served him so well before. He is thrown to a pack of hungry press animals, anxiously waiting in front of the precinct house to tear McCoy apart as he is arrested. The circus arrest is followed by the drama of a holding tank, complete with sinister Bronx criminal types, rats and other indignities to Sherman McCoy's person. By the time McCoy...