Tom Wolfe’s “Back to Blood” reviewed by Ron Charles
For a few hundred pages, this circus of tribal warfare is entertaining enough. Wolfe’s attention to ethnolects — the peculiar dialects of various ethnic groups — can be laborious, but it highlights the way people encode their insults and their superiority in language. Unfortunately, he relies on some clunky punctuation to convey internal dialogue, e.g. “::::::A raccoon he calls me!::::::” But if you can stomach that typographical contrivance :::::::So many colons!:::::: you’ll enjoy everyone’s panicked thoughts. For a nation of immigrants, we’re still comically sensitive around one another, and Miami is a perfect place to watch the melting pot boil.
Soon, though, the whole apparatus grows awfully wobbly, and the novel’s broad spectrum shifts to primary colors. Wolfe has never been a terribly subtle writer, but he’s usually an engaging one. This time the lack of nuance is wearing, like a camp skit that drags on till long after the fire has burned out. The essentialist statements — about the way Cubans are, the way blacks are, the way Russians are, even the way men and women are — reduce everyone to not-very-interesting types. Scenes set at an “active adults” apartment complex made me nostalgic for the Wildean wit of “The Golden Girls.”
Worse, rather than concentrate on Nestor as his athletic heroism spoils in the toxic air of Miami’s racial atmosphere, Wolfe chases after a gaggle of distracting plotlines that don’t effectively cohere. (One telling indication of this problem is the opening of Chapter 7, which begins, “Nestor Camacho — remember him?”) A case of teacher-student abuse runs through the novel but remains thinly sketched and extraneous. The goofy intrigue of Wolfe’s Russian gangsters wouldn’t stump Scooby-Doo. His parody of journalism’s decline has been crumbled up in the recycling bin for years. And it’s very late in the decline of Western civilization to be satirizing the absurdity of the art market; nothing here approaches the snap and insight of Wolfe’s scathing critique in “The Painted Word” almost 40 years ago.
One might have hoped that “I Am Charlotte Simmons” had spent the 81-year-old author’s lust for sexual anthropology, but no. . . . The effect is reminiscent of George H.W. Bush discovering the grocery store scanner — and just about as erotic. At one point, for instance, Wolfe explains that Nestor “has been seeing her, dating her, which is to say, these days, going to bed with her.” Aha! While no one who read it will ever forget the equine mating scene in “A Man in Full,” the sex in “Back to Blood” is just loud and repellent. An extended scene at a strip club BEAT thung strains to be BEAT thung phantasmagoric but merely BEAT thung hyperventilates. ::::::Get this author some air!!!:::::: Nestor’s ex-girlfriend and her creepy psychiatrist-lover drag us through “the pustular oozing of complete freedom,” which is a great phrase and about all I can quote here. The climax, so to speak, takes place at a regatta-orgy for horny trust-fund kids who are thrilled to recognize the famous porn doctor from his recent appearance on “60 Minutes.” (You know how the young people love watching “60 Minutes.”) Wolfe’s position is hard to pin down amid all this lechery. He carries on like a horny preacher getting off on the lurid terms of his own jeremiad.
I suppose when you’ve paid $7 million for a manuscript, you can’t very well start tossing golden chunks of it onto the floor, but “Back to Blood” could have been much better under a stronger editorial hand. Nestor is sweet and endearing; the story of him mutating into “a one-man race riot” would have provided plenty of action for a wide-screen social novel. The comedy, alternately broad and wry; moments of masterfully engineered calamity; and a bold grasp of a whole city are all here buried beneath diversions and cartoonish detours. Miami deserves better, and so do we. The author of “Back to Blood” should have been sent back to work.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter: @RonCharles.
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