Back to Blood: A Novel

The novel's title, "Back to Blood," refers to the subliminal, if not irrational, instinct to belong to, trust, and affiliate with one's own biological kind, that is, to racial or ethnic identity. In an age when other values are in flux, this is the fallback position. The setting of this story is Miami, Florida, a major city dominated by Cubans, with significant enclaves of Haitians, American Blacks, other Latinos, Jewish retirees from New York, Russian emigres, and a significant number of Anglos who are economically and educationally well-off, wielding influence rather than power, beset with the decadence that comes from affluence without responsibility.The story centers on Nestor, the Cuban policeman assigned to the water patrol, a part of the Miami Police still dominated by Anglo officers. The overlapping dynamics of police culture, Cuban versus Anglo social norms, and their resulting tensions is tellingly portrayed in the course of Nestor's carrying out a difficult order to rescue a Cuban refugee trapped on the crow's nest of a sailing ship that has drifted too close to a bridge. The refugee, fearing he would be arrested before he could reach shore and claim asylum, boards the luxury vessel where the owner's son is partying with friends, then runs to the mast and climbs up to his dangerous perch, where he causes a traffic jam on the bridge. Nestor climbs up the mast and holds the refugee by his legs as he works hand over hand down the yard arm, winning the respect of his police colleagues. He is televised and celebrated on the news for his athletic feat. But the Cuban community sees the deed as the arrest of a countryman fleeing from Communism and regards Nestor as a traitor and pariah, including and especially his family. At the same time his girlfriend, Magdalena, unaware of Nestor's celebrity/notoriety, has decided to call their relationship quits in favor of one she has developed with her boss, an Anglo psychiatrist almost twice her age, but somewhat of a celebrity noted for his treatment of "pornography addiction." The story traces these two individuals' experiences, choices, and interactions with members of all the aforementioned Miami communities, several of which are also well-developed characters.The Author's vivid portrayal of communities and individuals, with especial attention to social class, is a great strength of this narrative. The rich interaction of varying perspectives and the humor that arises therefrom is almost Shakespearean. Generational perspectives and the diverse development of siblings is also reflected in this story. I listened to the reading of Lou Diamond Philips on Brilliance Audio who conveyed the Cuban, Black, Russian, New York, Haitian accents, along with individual characteristics, in a manner that served the narrative well.It is common sense, yet controversial, that an individual may hold ethnic, gender, and racial prejudice (some would say that is inseparable from being ethnocentric), and yet be able to fraternize with and respect, individuals of other categories. This is amply illustrated throughout this story in the interactions Nestor and Magdalena have when each leaves the tight-knit Cuban community to live and work with people of varying background, and with differing values stemming from both social conditioning which is race/class/gender specific, and personal choice which may be myopic/oblivious, or aware/discreet.There was also a telling portrayal of the differences between men and women, whose habits of thinking and interacting also lead to contrasting cultures within ethnic or racial cultures. There was a strong element of sex in this novel which many readers will find distasteful, if not morally objectionable. Insofar as this element is A) a reflection of American morals, and B) a reflection of the choices, flaws, mistakes, crimes, or obsessions of the various characters, I might allow that they are artistically justified. Though there is a lot, I would not characterize it as gratuitous. I appreciate that it is presented in an uncommonly honest way, for example, men who find individuals attractive, but set these lustful thoughts aside to focus on the duty of the moment. Our Author avoids the all or nothing approach whereby characters. are either all lust or all purity. What is more, the story has scenes which bring out the ambiguous nature of sex, as when one of the female characters chooses to dress in a breast-revealing outfit and alternates through the evening between pride that all the men are glancing at her and embarrassment that all the men are glancing at her. Her feelings about her date shift from hopes to win him, then despair when she realizes (or convinces herself) that she was just a one-night throw-away. The man's power and charisma at first excited her, and within 12 hours frightened her. This is real life, worth pondering.There is also several revealing portrayals of manly ritual, the posturing, silent challenging, looks and verbal formulae that save face, require acknowledgment, or establish dominance. Interestingly, many of these transcend ethnic and racial barriers but are meaningless across gender lines. I appreciate the Author's ability to observe and articulate what most men only intuit.Who wins at the end of the story? The individuals who retain integrity. This integrity is based on values that transcend the convenient or momentary. They are often intuited, though not directly expressed. This integrity is threatened by group-think (I am nothing more than my ethnicity/class/race/etc.) which insists on sacrificing the individual's perspective based on experience to the group's narrative based on emotion (usually fear) and imagination. But, this integrity is also threatened by the individual's own selfishness which may blind him/her to the fact that the heart wants contradictory things and must choose. American culture, by affirming that all values are "equal," ends up relying on the lowest common denominator ("Everyone's talking about the new craze, Honey- All you are looks and a whole lot of money..."). Wolfe's story of Miami characters working out a personal integrity presents a penetrating portrait of American culture.

Much like Conrad Hensley discovering the Stoics in A Man in Full, I stumbled across Tom Wolfe by what felt in hindsight like fate when searching for books by David Foster Wallace in the public library. They didn't have any DFW I hadn't read, but I'd seen Wolfe's name mentioned often, so I figured I'd give him a go. Within a year I ended up reading all of his major works, and now I'd put him towards the top of the list as one of my favorite authors.Given the fact that Wolfe is now eighty-one years old, I wasn't expecting to see another major novel from him after I Am Charlotte Simmons. With the idea in mind that I'd be reading his last major work, and upon reading that he'd returned to his calling of depicting major American cities that he executed so beautifully in his first two novels, my expectations were very high.Right before the text arrived, I was a bit dispirited to see the novel panned in Harper's, a magazine that has been a champion of Wolfe's career for quite some time. Nevertheless, I figured the reviewer may have had his biases, and I was still looking forward to tearing into the book on the day it arrived from pre-order. It didn't take long for me to understand what the reviewer was complaining about. Wolfe has always done a brilliant job of intertwining his impressive command of classical prose with conventions of his own invention. In the past, this has resulted in a unique style that keeps the text vivid and engaging. In Back to Blood, the balance that was present in his previous works was upset by an excess of gimmicks that eventually had me skimming passages that became increasingly tedious to read. As is apparent in reviews already posted, this led to many readers putting down the book before getting half way through it.I, however, found the complex web of characters, fast-paced multiple-plot development, incisive critique of the socially contrived economics of the art world, and descriptions of modern-day Miami to be engaging enough to keep me glued to the pages. I ended up giving the book four stars since while it's not Wolfe's best, it's still much better than many books I've read.Although I bought-in to most of what Wolfe was conveying in the book and feel like I have a better understanding of a city that I've always found to be unique while equally alluring and revolting, there were a few issues that kept popping up in my mind when I stepped away from the text.The largest relates to his depiction of the different cultures in the book. It seems as if Wolfe selected Miami as his final subject primarily for its cultural diversity, specifically its immigrant majority. While he appeared to be attempting to paint an objective picture of the predominant cultures and how they interact, the end result was an overt ode to WASPs and their cultural, moral, and economic superiority over any other group. He's essentially saying, "Here we have a city where non-whites have assumed control, but outside of the surreal bubble of this anomaly of an American city where these people have amassed power as a result of their sheer numbers, there's really not much hope for these poor folk in the bigger picture."Sure, if one looks at the numbers, in spite of all sorts of progress, white males still tend to come out on top. I don't hold it against Wolfe for pointing out that fact. It's the way that he repeatedly drives the point home by making two of the Cuban protagonists feel constantly inferior to the whites (WASP and otherwise) around them as a result of not knowing words they use and being unfamiliar with the subjects they discuss. He even goes so far as to mention something a character thinks in sophisticated diction, but then adds a qualifier along the lines of "But not in those exact words, because Nestor wouldn't know what they mean." It would be one thing if Nestor and Magdalena just hopped off the raft and barely had a command of the English language when they spoke, but the diction in their dialog, and their professions, which both require a reasonably sophisticated education, contradict the degree of incompetence regularly portrayed in their interactions. It's as if in the end, Wolfe is portraying the citizens of Miami much like a stuffy anthropologist describing citizens of a third world country: As fascinating and impressive as these folks are in some aspects of their lives, one can clearly see they could never even dream of rising to my level of worldly sophistication.Another item Wolfe tends to embrace while appearing to criticize is pornography. Sure, you need regular helpings of sex and death to keep a novel interesting, and part of what has always drawn me to Wolfe's writing is his highbrow depiction of lowbrow living. But in this case, an analogy could be made between Wolfe as an author and the character Norman Lewis as a psychiatrist: Lewis, while ostensibly undertaking the noble pursuit of curing pornography addicts is eventually exposed as being sex-obsessed himself. As the book carries on, it seems as if Wolfe created Lewis to give himself a license to include unlimited sexual content. It's not that I mind reading about sex, which I'm assuming is what compelled Wolfe to include so much of it in the book, but between all of Lewis's sex-related scenes and the numerous romantic relationships in the book, I sometimes felt more like I was reading a supermarket romance novel than a valid critique of modern culture.These things aside, the book still was worth reading. I stopped twenty pages short of the ending yesterday and couldn't wait to resume for the conclusion. Unlike some of his earlier novels, Wolfe does a good job concluding the novel by tying together and presenting satisfying resolutions to the numerous plots established throughout the text. While Wolfe may not have ended his novel-writing career on the highest note he's ever struck, I applaud him for working his magic one more time.

This is a hugely engaging portrait of the jungle of human life in the mixed race US city of Miami. Read this and you will understand better some of the forces that drove Donald J Trump to power - and are pushing other voters to give the thumbs down to traditional politicians. In the Miami of 'Back to Blood', fear of other human beings is ever-present. The novel starts with the ostracism of a Cuban cop by family and community for the unexpected consequences of a heroic act which wreck the chances of a fellow Cuban. Reflecting the immigration theme of the title, the novel then shows the different racial groups (whites, blacks, Cubans, Haitians,Russians, Jews and others) fighting against each other and amongst themselves. Some of the worst acts are, in fact, carried out within the ethnic groups. A brilliant journalist, Tom Wolfe foresaw the Trump world and its creation themes before most of us. The novel brings in all levels of society - from the Russian oligarch to coach loads of elderly shoppers to the white journalists. For all that it paints a dangerous and brutal world, it is never cynical. The characters who emerge sane, alike and likeable are those who manage to control their the sense of fear and give a hand to others. Always amusing and realistic, 'Back to Blood' has some wonderful portrayals of human clashes - such as the meeting between the Cuban mayor and five Cuban underlings with the black police chief.

Tom Wolfe is still a journalist at heart, and it shows in his lovingly researched detail, but it also makes him an excellent novelist. The story in this new blockbuster is not about to shake the world or astonish any philosophers of human nature, but it is a tale full of life and fresh colors, with enough fun in its chapters tracing a few intertwined narratives set among Cuban and Russian immigrant communities in Miami to keep one happily turning the pages. I'm impressed that a relatively old man can write such a book with such evident relish. Recently I seem to have read too many accounts of or by novelists who are younger than Wolfe but despair of ever writing good stuff again. It can be done. But it takes a zest and an appetite for life that Tom Wolfe obviously still has, and the others apparently no longer have. Only one caveat: Wolfe's trademark typographical exuberance spills over again in this novel, and it's fun, but one gets the impression he was playing his keyboard like a manic impresario at a concert hall piano. Fewer symbols and more poise would do no harm, and reduce the page count a little too.

I've enjoyed all Tom Wolfe's work from his journalistic / essay-style writing (Painted Word, Electric Cool Aid Acid Test, Right Stuff etc) to his novels from Bonfire of the Vanities onwards. I'd read mixed reviews about his latest work, Back To Blood, but thought that even a mediocre Tom Wolfe was probably going to be a decent read. It wasn't mediocre at all - I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, since reading it, I've re-read Bonfire Of The Vanities and A Man In Full (Charlotte Simmonds to be read next) and I think that Back To Blood bears comparison with both of them and there's no sign of ailing powers commented on by some reviewers. OK, some of the punctuaion is idiosyncratic to say the least and he does have a bee in his bonnet about modern art, but I think he's still the most perceptive, entertaining and amusing satirist around.

There's a scene towards the end of Back to Blood when we finally get inside the secret studio of the elusive Russian artist Igor Drukovich. In public an arch-devotee of realism, Igor has hidden away in his studio a series of copies of modernist, surrealist, abstract and cubist masterpieces by the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinksy and Braque -- the very artists he sneers at in public. But it turns out they are perfect forgeries Igor has been living off, laughing behind his hand as he deludes the art establishment which has rejected him.It's hard not to suspect this might have something to do with Wolfe's own very public spat with the literary modernists. Like his character Igor, Wolfe is an exponent of realism in an age when it's out of fashion. Like Igor, he has publicly attacked the fashionable . Is he perhaps hinting that, like Igor, he could effortlessly replicate his rivals' works, while they couldn't copy his realism?The thing is, though, that Wolfe hasn't proved all that versatile in his fictional career. After the dazzling success of Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full he decided to turn his hand to something different in I am Charlotte Simmons. He tried to write the sort of novel his rivals excel at, set on the small canvas of a university campus, and focused on the interior life of its characters, but the result fell flat. Robbed of material suited to the satire at which he excels, he fell back on toilet humour -- literally, with a grotesque recital of the gruntings and strainings of a male undergraduate at stool.Thankfully in Back to Blood he is back to what he does best, painting the life of an entire city, and following a wide cast of characters and the intricate ways they're connected. The protagonist is Nestor Camacho, an ambitious young cop. The child of Cuban immigrants, he sees a career in the police as his passport to acceptance by the wider community. The irony, as Wolfe gleefully describes, is that the Cubans already are the wider community of Miami, a city where immigrants are the majority. And Nestor's moment of triumph, as he saves the life of a would-be Cuban immigrant from Cuba live on TV, is also his downfall, as the man is arrested and deported, and Nestor is disowned by his own family.That's the moment which sets everything else off in Back to Blood, which will force Nestor into an uneasy alliance with John Smith, a WASP reporter who is trying to uncover the truth aboutthe mysterious connection between Igor the artist and Sergei Korolyov, a Russian billionaire who has bought his way to the sort of social acceptance Nestor yearns for. Which will force Nestor out of his prestigious job on a police boat and onto a crime beat where he will be accused of brutality towards an African American suspect, and meet a stunning Haitian beauty.And at the same time Nestor's old girlfriend, Magdalena, is on her own quest for acceptance, cut adrift from her Cuban immigrant roots just like Nestor. But while he is fighting to clear his name amid the crack dens of Miami, she seems on a relentless rise, with a rich new boyfriend who can take her to the most glittering parties in town.It's the perfect canvas for Wolfe, who gets to give us a succession of the set pieces he is justly famous for: billionaires fighting like children to get the best paintings at an art sale; a police raid on a crack den; a reality TV show crew trying to start a fight at a high society party; Nestor and John Smith undercover at a lap dancing club.This is a novel about outsiders, and their quest for acceptance. But the joke's on them, because they live in a city where everyone's an outsider, where even the privileged WASP newspaper editor is ill at ease and feels out of place. There's a scene where Nestor and John Smith are tailing Igor out of the city, and they come to a place which Nestor finds disconcerting and unfamiliar. "We've just entered a strange land...called America!" John Smith says, and then, echoing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, "We're not in Miami anymore".America is, of course, a country founded on immigration, but Wolfe's Miami is still in the crucible, being formed, while the rest of America has stratified around it. The structures of the rest of America don't apply in this Miami, it is the city of the future.For all its zest and fun, this is a big, serious book then, about a big, serious subject, every bit as ambitious as Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, and to a large extent Wolfe pulls it off. That his conclusions often seem at odds with current fashionable thought doesn't matter a bit. He deserves a hearing.But Back to Blood is not without its faults. The novel starts superbly, hurling the reader in medias res, and ends on an exhilarating high with Nestor and John's newspaper investigation, which proves that even in the days of the internet, it's still possible to write classic newsroom high drama.But, surprisingly, it sags in the middle. This is largely down to the Magdalena subplot. While Nestor remains a sympathetic character throughout his tribulations, it's harder to root for Magdalena after she callously ditches him on her very first appearance -- and at his lowest ebb too. Her new lover, Norman the sex doctor, and Maurice his billionaire patron, are deliciously grotesque at first but after a while they just become grating.It's not till Magdalena gets involved with the Russian billionaire Sergei that her subplot picks up -- Wolfe pulls the oligarch off brilliantly, his ruthless exercise of power at once enticing and chilling.The other problem with Back to Blood is, still more surprisingly, with its style. Wolfe is a great prose stylist: he was famous for his style long before he ever turned to fiction, back when he was a pioneer of the New Journalism.But in Back to Blood it all seems a little too overblown, there's too much onomatopoeia, too many arch new phrases for the familiar, too many interjections from - ¡Dios mío! -- the characters' own voices, too much description, too much of everything. There are even two scenes, in the lapdancing club and on a boat, where Wolfe feels impelled to embed the beat of the music in his prose BEAT thung as if for the BEAT thung benefit of BEAT thung readers who BEAT thung have never BEAT thung been in a night club. It all gets a bit tiresome and hard to read.Indeed, in the lapdancing club scene, there's a sentence that's so jarringly out of character for Wolfe that you read it twice: "The smile looked like a mean streak turned up at the corners". It's a great sentence, but it's more like something Raymond Chandler would have written, and it makes you suddenly aware of how, for all his brilliance, Wolfe may have become something of a prisoner of his own dazzling style. And it makes you wonder if he does have a secret studio like Igor's somewhere, after all.

I became a fan when I read "Bonfire" and this certainly was almost as enjoyable. It has a comic, exaggerated approach which perfectly matches many of the cultural attitudes in the US of A right now. It brilliantly conveys the apparent egocentric insularity abroad in that country. He also satirically conveys the truth that suggests Western culture in general is growing dangerously fat on pornography, self-aggrandisement and a malaise of the "me, me, me" environment.Fabulous read. My only minor gripe is that it felt as if it had done its job about three quarters way through and so ran out of a bit of steam towards the end.