Four years ago, news broke that Tom Wolfe, the white-suited gladiator of New Journalism, was writing a novel about Miami. He’d already taken on New York and Atlanta in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full” — thick, pugilistic novels that punched their way into the zeitgeist. Even his ridiculous sexcapade, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” couldn’t depress the potential value of his Miami story in progress. Little, Brown lured Wolfe away from his longtime publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux, with an advance rumored to be close to $7 million. And now we finally have it — “Back to Blood” — a novel that cost $10,000 per page.
That’s the kind of ludicrous excess that Wolfe loves to parody. But readers (and Little, Brown’s accountants) may not appreciate the joke.
“Back to Blood” is a screwball comedy that wants to stretch its ham-hands around the whole sunbaked city and feel the pulse of all its seething conflicts. In a chaotic world without religion, patriotism or civility, “that leaves only our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies, to unite us.” And this city of recent immigrants is ground zero. As the Cuban mayor tells the black chief of police:“If you really want to understand Miami, you got to realize one thing first of all. In Miami, everybody hates everybody.” To beat that point home, Wolfe constructs a Balkanized town and a narrative that reads like a gabby encyclopedia of ethnic stereotypes.
His young hero is a Cuban American cop named Nestor Camacho, newly promoted to the elite Marine Patrol. He’s eager, idealistic and muscle-bound like Mr. Universe. (Deltoids, pectorals, quadriceps — Wolfe chants these terms as if he’s studying for a phys ed exam.) In the novel’s one spectacularly exciting scene, the Marine Patrol is called to investigate a sailboat floating close to the Rickenbacker Causeway, which runs from Miami to Key Biscayne.Traffic has stopped on the bridge, and spectators are screaming. A half-drowned Cuban refugee has sneaked onto a schooner and scurried up its 70-foot foremast. Determined to prove himself a good cop, Nestor — half-Superman, half-Spider-Man — climbs up the foremast and brings the terrified refugee down, ready to be sent back to Cuba. Nestor’s instantly transformed into a media sensation, a fitness guru and a traitor to his people in a city itching to riot.
It’s a fantastic setup, full of loud noises — SMACK — and exclamations in CAPITAL LETTERS, even if the effect suffers from the diminishing returns of someone grasping for attention by RAISING HIS VOICE!!! Wolfe is a sorcerer who can stir up a storm of swirling characters, all of them trapped in their own dilemmas and delusions. The raging Cuban community wants Nestor’s head. Nestor’s family turns him out. His luscious girlfriend tosses him over for a celebrity psychiatrist who treats (and cultivates) billionaire porn addicts. The silver-spooned new editor of the Miami Herald hates journalism but knows a good story when YouTube delivers it to his front page. And a Russian oligarch has just elbowed his way into high society by filling the art museum with modern masters.
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