The first part of this book took me ages to read. AGES, I tell you. I think it was so because I despised most of the characters and had a really hard time trying to feel empathy towards them. After finishing the book, I failed miserably in that aspect. No, the first world problems of a WASP, Wall Street yuppie didn’t manage to get my sympathy in any way possible. Sherman McCoy was a really irritating character.

This novel is about him and the consequences of one night in his life. While driving his mistress (so, yeah, he was a cheater) to their secret rendezvous, the couple hit a young black man, Henry Lamb. Dismissing the incident, they go about their business as usual. The problem comes when this young man ends up in a comma because he hit his head after his encounter with the car.

Despite the sever unlikability of almost every character in this book, I do believe it manages to paint a pretty decent image of this type of world. We get people with good intentions but without the resources to do any actual change, people who manipulate others for their own gain (oh, Reverend Bacon), and others who just worry about the money. Even the journalist who helps to get attention to the case is pretty unlikable. And the D.A. that does everything he can to convict McCoy is also a cheater, so maybe the message is that they’re not so different in the end?
The only moments in which I sort of liked Mr. McCoy were when he thought about his daughter, Campbell. He was genuinely worried about the effect that his arrest and eventual conviction, and even the media coverage were going to have upon his little girl. In that sense, he gained a few points with me. During the rest of the novel, he came across as an annoying guy who never wanted to assume his responsibility.

All the other characters, lawyers, officials of the government and so on, were also pretty unlikable. I felt (and it might have been the author’s intention) that they were more concerned with getting better publicity than actually doing justice. Henry Lamb was for them a mere excuse to convict a rich dude (he deserved it, though) and show them in a positive light, as if they were doing something.

The same goes for Reverend Bacon, the guy who supposedly wants to change the things for the people in the projects. In his discourse, everything is more an attack on the establishment than explaining the actual problems the people in the projects have to face every day. And he never mentions specific ways to change all that, he keeps calling the authorities out on the McCoy/Lamb case.

So, when the story ends, we know that nothing is going to really change. McCoy may go to prison, but the projects will always be pretty much the same and so on. One man’s life will be changed forever, but the city will go on as usual.

That’s depressing, to say the least. I wish the book had ended with a more positive outlook.