Book Review: Back to Blood, by Tom Wolfe (2012)

 

Paperback cover of Back to Blood, by Tom Wolfe, 2012. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The author Tom Wolfe, 1930-2018.

Miami! Pastel buildings! The sunshine! Cuban immigrants! The nightlife! The Heat—the basketball team! The heat—the actual heat, from the sun! Miami Vice! Magic City! And—Santa Barranza!—who will tell us all about it? That’s right, the sage in the white suit, Tom Wolfe! At least that white suit will keep him cool in all this heat! What kind of panoramic panoply does the master have cooked up for us this time to keep us entertained? Russian oligarchs! Strip cubs! Porn-addicted billionaires! It’s all here inside the covers of, yes, wait for it::::::BACK TO BLOOD!  

You’re used to the prose just sitting there, sometimes even limply lying there on the page, aren’t you? Well, friends, that’s not Tom Wolfe’s style! His sentences practically jump off the page at you, daring you to ignore them! They DEMAND your attention, like a siren going WEEE-OOOO, WEEE-OOOO in the middle of the night, invading your sleep patterns and incepting themselves in your dreams! And suddenly you’re caught! You find yourself thrown into the world of a Tom Wolfe novel—WHHOOOSSSHH, like a screwball being hurled by a pitcher, you find yourself tumbling end over end, marveling at all these new things you’ve never noticed before! You dream about going to parties, and you find yourself staring at people’s shoes, men’s and women’s, trying to figure out what brand they are. The carpeting is so soft—is it Streptolon? It must be. And you can’t help but stare at the couch. Those impossibly plush cushions–has anyone even SAT on this thing yet? And the color, just how would you describe it? Sort of a mauve, not quite dark enough to be eggplant, it’s paler than that, and yet…in this dim artificial light it looks almost pinkish sometimes…and you wake up with a start, sweating with the worry that you’ll say the wrong thing and never get invited back!  

Back to Blood was Tom Wolfe’s fourth novel. Published in October of 2012, it was the last of Wolfe’s novels to be published in his lifetime. I wish that Tom Wolfe had lived long enough to write a novel about every major city in the United States. Of course, that’s wishful thinking, since it usually took Wolfe several years to write a novel. But I’d love to have his take on all the different places that make up this huge, complicated country.  

Like Wolfe’s other novels, Back to Blood is a sprawling book, taking in numerous characters and locales, from Miami Art Basel to Hialeah, the neighborhood where most of Miami’s Cuban immigrants live. It’s 700 pages of immersive detail into Miami.  

Wolfe dives deep into the psyches of his different characters, writing out their reactions moment by moment. By using this technique, you’re quickly immersed in the insecurities of his characters. Wolfe is never brought up as a chronicler of anxieties the same way that say, Philip Roth is, but I’d argue that Wolfe was a master of noting the status anxieties of the American male. Wolfe understands that even when it seems like something isn’t about status, it still is.  

There are numerous far-fetched coincidences in the plot of Back to Blood, but all of Wolfe’s novels hinge on sometimes unlikely events throwing his cast of characters together. Critic and novelist Thomas Mallon wrote of Wolfe in his review of Back to Blood: “He believes that the forest makes the trees, not the other way around, and that’s why he will be remembered as a formidable replicator of times and places rather than a great creator of characters.” I’d agree with Mallon’s assessment—what we remember most from Wolfe’s fiction are the worlds he throws us into more than the individual characters. But there are few writers who have given us the kind of immersive, detailed worlds that Wolfe throws the reader into.  

I’ve now read all of Tom Wolfe’s books, and while I was reading Back to Blood, a certain melancholy would creep in, knowing that I have no more of his books to read for the first time. Perhaps the thing I will miss the most about Tom Wolfe is his playful exuberance. This was a man who took such joy, such pleasure in the written language that he found it necessary to break the conventional rules of writing and punctuation, to use multiple exclamation marks, colons, onomatopoeia, to do whatever it took to engage the reader and to fully express himself. THAT’S how much he loved language and writing. You might love Wolfe’s style or hate it, but he made the reader pay attention.  

Fans of Wolfe’s will be amused that two of the restaurants in Back to Blood are named Balzac’s and Gogol’s, a little tribute to two of Wolfe’s favorite 19th-century authors. There are other little Wolfe in-jokes throughout the novel, including a “tan Streptolon industrial carpet” on page 495—Streptolon is a fictitious fabric that Wolfe invented in the 1960’s, and it makes an appearance in just about all of Wolfe’s books.  

Wolfe was a firm believer that status played an important role in people’s lives. In Back to Blood, the chief of police has this thought: 

“People would sooner talk about their sex lives—sometimes, among cops, you couldn’t shut them up—or their money or their messy marriages or their sins in the eyes of God...about anything other than their status in this world...their place in the social order, their prestige or their mortifying lack of it, the respect they get, the respect they don’t get, their jealousy and resentment of those who wallow in respect everywhere they set foot...” (p.226)  

That quote seems to me an accurate summary of one of the key themes that runs through much of the writing of Tom Wolfe.