Bravura in a popular (and very literary) novel: Tom Wolfe's 1986 classic, "The Bonfire of the Vanities"

I read Wolfe's first novel – The Bonfire of the Vanities – back in 1987 when it first appeared in book form (it had been serialized, a la Charles Dickens, in "Rolling Stone" magazine starting in 1984) – and spent 27-plus hours of the last two weeks listening to an excellent Audible version of the book. It is a nineteenth century novel for the twentieth century, a vast canvas that depicted all of New York City, from the upper reaches of the Wall Street/Park Avenue/WASP coterie to the mean streets of the Bronx, and captures so much of the ethos of the 1980s: Wall Street bigwigs accorded quasi-rock star status, conspicuous consumption was lauded, the city's racial tensions were erupting, to name a few.

I'm reasonably sure it's not capital-L literature, but its epic, Dickensian scope and conception, its devotion to the idea of plot, and the sheer excellence and exuberance of the prose (which Wolfe had demonstrated many, many time before in his nonfiction) place The Bonfire of the Vanities at the high-water mark of popular fiction. Frankly, I wish more of today's literary writers had some of Wolfe's commitment to storytelling. (And I will add that the Audible version features an incredible narrator named Joe Barrett. What a performance!)