Malice Toward All, Charity Toward Some : THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES <i> by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 659 pp.)</i>

What subway rider Bernard Goetz aimed at with his gun, the more gently-conveyed Tom Wolfe aims at with his novel. Both of them dramatize the jungle that threatens the peaceful urban citizen. Both have a point. Yet, both dehumanize their targets so they can, in fact, be targets instead of people. And both dehumanize themselves in the process.

This may seem unfair to the witty and thoughtful author of “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Wolfe’s first work of pure fiction is infinitely more fun than Goetz’s pistol, and infinitely less damaging. It is a comical and often ferociously acute satire of New York City life.

Satires are supposed to be harsh; that is not the problem. Furthermore, Wolfe’s harshness ranges widely among Wall Street hotshots, high society, the press, city politics, the demagoguery of black leaders, the hopelessly engorged criminal justice system and corruptions great and small.

The harshness is even-handed. It is the sympathy that is one-sided and that gives “Bonfire,” for all its felicities, a moral gimp.

Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street whiz-kid, a million-dollar-a-year man avid for real bucks, gets involved in a hit-and-run death while out driving with his mistress. The victim is a black youth. Agitated by a black community leader, an unscrupulous left-wing lawyer and a sensationalist tabloid, the incident stirs up a political firestorm.

Sherman, who was not really at fault, finds himself handcuffed, put inside a detention pen with a bunch of rough and non-WASPy fellow prisoners and facing a ruinous and seemingly endless series of trials. It is to be a legal lynching whose purpose, pressed by a politically minded district attorney, is to show the city’s blacks and Latinos that the rich cannot get away with murder even if they didn’t commit it.

Wolfe’s New York is a wretched, teeming Third World capital dotted here and there with enclaves of privilege: Brooklyn Heights, Forest Hills and part of Manhattan. “Hong Kongs,” Wolfe calls them. Weiss, the Bronx district attorney, whose borough is almost entirely Third World, puts it more picturesquely. “Manhattan is an offshore boutique,” he says.

Sherman’s tragicomedy begins when he falls out of his enclave. One night, he meets his girlfriend, Maria, at the airport and they head for their East Side love nest. Driving his Mercedes sports car, he takes a wrong turn off the highway, gets lost in the Bronx and is stopped by an old tire suddenly thrown in his path. He gets out, is confronted by two black youths apparently intent on robbing him, bops one of them with the tire and climbs hastily back into the car. With Maria now driving, they zip off. There is a faint thud but it’s too dark to see what, if anything, has happened.

For Sherman and Maria, now safely back in their refuge, it has been a nightmare entirely recognizable to anyone who has driven through New York’s roughest neighborhoods. What if the car breaks down? What if it runs out of gas?

When you awaken from a nightmare, of course, you don’t think of the damage you may have done to the monsters . Sherman has a qualm or two, but the couple reports nothing to the police. There may, after all, have been nothing to report; and if there was, they were only defending themselves. It is a splendid scene, a splendid construct of understandable rationalizations. They abound throughout the book. Wolfe, founder-patron of the New Journalism with its proto-fictional techniques, slides into his novel as if it had been waiting for him all along.

It is a novel as morality tale, and its theme is “What fools these mortals be, and what a mess they have made of things.” Wolfe recounts the steady downfall of Sherman with bravura and a fine mastery of plotting. His characters are social types, some of them so thinly drawn as to approach anorexia. What they are good at is inhabiting and dramatizing the institutions and customs that Wolfe reports with such wit.

East Side adultery, for example. To get out of his palatial apartment at night so he can telephone Maria and pay her a quick call of nature, Sherman insists to his wife, Judy, that he must walk their dachshund. It is raining and the dachshund resists. Under his doorman’s quizzical eye, Sherman drags the toe-scrabbling animal down the sidewalk to a phone booth. Flustered, he dials his own number by mistake and asks Judy--he doesn’t recognize her voice, of course--for Maria. One more high-life marriage goes on the skids.

Wolfe has great fun with the trading room on Wall Street where Sherman is a star. It is filled with “the sound of well-educated young white men baying for money on the bond market.” The boss’ office, old-English and Chippendale, has a fireplace that cost $350,000 to tunnel through the high-tech vents and conduits.

The opposite extreme is the Bronx Criminal Courthouse, so beleaguered in its combat zone that nobody goes out for lunch. Two hundred seventy assistant district attorneys work there, processing an endless stream of minority defendants which they call “The Chow.” It feeds them, but it doesn’t nourish them, any more than their send-in deli sandwiches nourish them.

“It was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, ‘What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail.’ ” Not pleasant, not professionally rewarding, and not--in the long run, and at the level of the assistants’ boss, District Attorney Weiss--politically sound.

What Weiss is looking for--Wolfe gives him some lines that make an interesting blend of crass opportunism and unorthodox political theorizing--is the Great White Defendant. Weiss’ tenacity earns him, of course, the sobriquet of Captain Ahab. His Moby Dick turns out to be Sherman, with his $2,000 suits and his Park Avenue address.

Wolfe gives us tired cops, cynical lawyers, socialites, demagogic community leaders, a vile English reporter, a Rupert Murdoch-like tabloid publisher, a Mayor Koch-like mayor. One of his most entertaining characters is Sherman’s own lawyer, Killian, a criminal court veteran. Killian instructs his client in how things are. For example, there is the Favor Bank that links prosecutors, defense attorneys, policemen, crooks of various descriptions, and municipal politicians and employees at every level. Favors are done beforehand. “A deposit in the Favor Bank is not quid pro quo,” Killian explains. “It’s saving up for a rainy day.”

Wolfe’s wonderful ear sometimes plays odd tricks. He has an irritating tendency to write down New Yorkers’ speech phonetically and not always well. “Ayyyy Whaddaya Whaddaya,” several of his characters exclaim; I’m not sure why. His best range is middle-voiced irony; when he raises the volume, he flops. There is a Day-of-the-Locust riot, an overdone New York party, and a scene of a rich man dying in a fashionable restaurant; all try unsuccessfully to elevate grotesquerie to shattering judgment.

The crippling failure, amid the wit, is Wolfe’s blind-side empathies. Sherman is a rich fool, but he is Wolfe’s fool and Wolfe makes him ours. We feel his misery, fear and humiliation when he is handcuffed and put in the pen. It is murderously well-observed, but something is missing.

There are black men and Latins in the pen too; crooks, no doubt, but perhaps no more crooked--in the large sense of the word--than Sherman himself. Are none of them afraid or humiliated? Is manacling or the threat of rape not an intimate violation to them as well?

Wolfe gets into the skins of Sherman, Maria, Killian, his cops, and even of Weiss and the loathsome English reporter; even while he is satirizing them. Not very far in, perhaps. But not one of his Third World denizens is even incipiently human.

We are touched by Judy, Sherman’s wife and victim. Nothing suggests we might be touched by the dead black youth--who, it turns out, was as innocent as Sherman--or by his bereaved mother, whom Wolfe presents simply as a political pawn.

In the author’s bonfire, everybody’s vanities burn, but the vain themselves do not all burn equally. Some are allowed a glass of water. Others, very noticeably, are not.