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Nearly four decades after publication, Tom Wolfe's first novel still grabs a reader by the lapels and refuses to let go. That force is what I noticed first. Whatever else can be said about Sherman McCoy, Larry Kramer and Peter Fallow, and the doomed wrong turn into the Bronx that binds their fates together, this is a book built to be read compulsively. The plotting is craftily constructed, the set pieces are operatic, and the prose has a percussive energy that carries you through more than seven hundred pages without sagging.

The most durable achievement is the reporting. Wolfe spent months shadowing the Bronx homicide squad and a day on the Salomon Brothers bond desk, and the research shows on every page. The trading floor, the Park Avenue dinner party, the Bronx County Courthouse, the holding pens, the bistros and the boroughs all arrive in almost forensic detail. Wolfe notices shoes and suit linings and the way women of a certain age starve themselves into "social x-rays". He notices the arithmetic of a Wall Street salary that leaves its earner convinced he is bleeding money even as he banks a million a year. The result is a Dickensian panorama of New York at its 1980s peak that few subsequent American novels have matched for sheer ambition or for breadth of cast.

It is also a very funny book, and a very cruel one. The satire works by exposure rather than argument. Sherman McCoy, the self-styled Master of the Universe, is a ripe fool whose humiliation is fearsome and, in flashes, genuinely moving. Peter Fallow, the alcoholic British tabloid reporter, is a small masterpiece of self-loathing. Reverend Bacon, written before Al Sharpton became a household name, remains an uncomfortably prescient sketch of performative racial politics. The courtroom sequences, drawn from real observation, have a bleak hilarity few legal novelists have equalled.

The flaws, though, are real and have sharpened with time. The book claims to anatomise race relations in New York, yet grants interior life only to three white men. Black and Hispanic characters exist almost entirely as they are perceived, feared or exploited by the central trio, and the female characters are either social accessories or plot devices. The final courtroom reversal feels contrived, several subplots simply evaporate, and the closing epilogue lands with a thud. The prose style, all italics and exclamation and onomatopoeic shouting, can tip from exhilarating to exhausting depending on a reader's tolerance for Wolfe's higher registers.

And yet the novel endures. The world it describes, with pay phones and green-on-black trading screens and a pre-Giuliani Bronx, has largely vanished, but the appetites it anatomises, wealth, vanity, media opportunism, racial cynicism and the collision of all four inside a legal system that serves none of them well, are not going anywhere. Read it for the noise and the scope, and for sentences that still crackle. Its imperfections are considerable, but so is the achievement, and almost forty years on nothing has quite replaced it as the great novel of New York's gilded, nervy, combustible decade.