In the beginning was the Word. Not verbum, the written word, thought Erasmus, but sermo, the spoken word. Whatever its validity for understanding St. John’s Gospel, literature that matters seems to split along the lines of that dichotomy. There are exciting and important books that dance on the page, wheeling and turning at the command of a master drill sergeant, able to conquer vast terrains, but in silence. Read Kant, for instance, aloud, and his magic vanishes. Then there are the masters of the spoken language, who charm us because we can hear their voices, even if we cannot follow everything they are saying: Plato, Virgil, Dante, St. John himself.

Tom Wolfe belongs to the electric masters of logocentricity. To this day I can hear the famous party that pulsates at the center of “Radical Chic.” “Mr. Bernsteen.” “STEIN!” Of course, there are other sensual images in Wolfe’s carnival. He begins The Painted Word by comparing the experience of reading the Sunday New York Times not to an intellectual activity but to sinking slowly into a soporific hot tub. The image is as illuminating as it is witty. In the end, however, Tom Wolfe is meant to be read aloud.

In comparison with those earlier tone poems. The Bonfire of the Vanities is an oratorio sung by full choir. “There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” the old TV show used to end. It seems as though there are that many voices in this novel and each one heard and captured by Wolfe like a prize Lepidoptera, to be pinned exactly in context or, just as often, shoved violently into a situation where it stands out like a yuppie’s yellow tie against a Mafioso’s black shirt.

It is not easy to find the right parallel for this epic, performed not by a bard but by a city of voices. The main plot is a variant on Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, though with a surprise ending out of Baudelaire’s “Ecrasez les Pauvres!” (Well, I am trying not to give it away.) The depiction of the working stiffs of New York, seen at first harshly and crudely, but then revealed as rooted in intelligence and moral commitment, reminds me of the best of James Gould Cozzens. The one real parallel, however, seems to me John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Wolfe’s novel lacks the unforgettable hero of that comic masterpiece, but I left both books with my ears full of the sounds, spoken, whispered, shouted, of a great city.

Wolfe delights in playing with a significant linguistic reality, the use of the third person singular of the verb “to do” as a class marker in contemporary America. The educated use “he does not” as a matter of course, just as the poorer use “he don’t.” To appreciate Wolfe’s magic, however, you have to hear the intermediary sections of our society. We listen in on a D.A. trying to lure cooperation out of a recalcitrant black witness. To say “he does not” in that room would freeze up the witness by showing that he is confronted by a foreigner who speaks a different dialect. Alone with a trusted aide, preaching on the rights of the poor and puffed up with altruistic self-righteousness, the D.A. reverts to “he does not.” Future historians of American English will treasure this book.

Each reader will find his favorite part of this extravaganza. My own includes the savage picture of the parasitic Englishman, come over to work on the New York Post, who always slips away just before the check arrives, leaving it for the silly Yank off whom he wines and dines. There is the searing contrast between elite WASP America, which leaves even its closest friends in the lurch if notoriety impinges, with the dogged loyalty and honesty of middle-class Irish lawyers and policemen. The student of ethics will find as much to ponder as the linguist.

In the end, however, I remember the sounds: the laughter at an upperclass party, the background hysteria of the bonds market on Wall Street, the accents of English and German, of rich and poor. As Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi made us notice things we have had before us all our lives but have never seen, Tom Wolfe makes us hear the sounds of our own society. We shall never sound the same again.

[The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $19.95]