In Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe tries to do for Miami what he did for New York in The Bonfire of the Vanities and Atlanta in A Man in Full. The result is a soapy, gripping and sometimes glib novel that’s filled with heaps of contrivance and cartoonish antics, but that also stars two characters who attest to Mr Wolfe’s new and improved ability to conjure fully realised people.
As he steers this big boat of a story in careening circles of coincidence, Mr Wolfe drives home his by now familiar Darwinian view of human nature, even as he showers us with his much-imitated confetti of status and sartorial details. Once again, he depicts a dog-eat-dog world in which people behave like animals, scratching and clawing their way up the greasy social pole. Once again, he uses racial tensions – and their political fallout – to fuel his story line.
And once again, he uses lots of exclamatory dialogue (“Dirty traidor peeg!”) and sarcastic generalisations (“on street patrol a Cuban cop like him would make sure he got a short-sleeved uniform one size too small that brought out every bulge” of his chiselled upper body) to create shameless stereotypes based on ethnicity and class.
As he’s done in the past, Mr Wolfe excavates the world of the superrich with cackling glee, reduces politicians to caricatures of self-interest and mocks or eviscerates practically everybody else. Among the specimens he nets and tries to pin, wriggling, to the board are: Sergei Korolyov, a swaggering Russian oligarch who has suddenly arrived on the scene and donated $70 million in Russian modernist paintings to a new Miami art museum; Edward T Topping IV, a social-climbing, scaredy-cat WASP, who finds himself editing The Miami Herald; Lantier, a self-hating Haitian professor, who wants his daughter to pass as white; and Dr Norman Lewis, a randy, loathsome psychiatrist who specialises in treating pornography addicts.
Many of Mr Wolfe’s efforts to send up his subjects devolve into predictable setpieces mocking the antics of the rich to get into the most exclusive clubs or parties, to be “where things are happening,” to bask in the glow of celebrity while sending rays of schadenfreude toward their vanquished social rivals. Sex scenes – involving a regatta/orgy that features a pornographic film projected on the huge sails of a schooner – suffer from the sort of smarmy voyeurism that weighed down his last novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004).
What holds our attention in Back to Blood – and pushes us past the novel’s sometimes simplistic satire – are Mr Wolfe’s two main characters: Nestor Camacho, a heroic Cuban-American cop, who finds himself at the center of several race-based clashes that threaten to set off riots, and his former girlfriend Magdalena, an ambitious but good-hearted nurse who, after leaving him, finds herself in one dreadful relationship after another. Although Mr Wolfe can be patronising toward this pair, mocking them for their ignorance and naïveté, he also portrays them with genuine sympathy, using their earnest idealism as a prism by which to view the pretensions, social climbing and Machiavellian manipulation that burbles all around them.
Nestor is a likable Everyman, the son of Cuban immigrants. All he wants out of life is to be with his beloved Magdalena and to earn the respect of his fellow cops. His life is turned upside down after he rescues a Cuban refugee — a rescue that enrages Miami Cubans, when the refugee ends up in the hands of the Coast Guard, facing the threat of deportation. Nestor’s heroics in a crack-den bust – which appear in distorted form in a YouTube video – similarly threaten to ignite racial tensions. As for Magdalena, she is sucked into the snooty Miami art world after accompanying her boss to Miami Art Basel events, and finds herself falling for Korolyov – the toast of the town thanks to his big museum donation – at the very moment he has become the subject of a newspaper investigation into rumours that the paintings he gave are forgeries.
Mr Wolfe doesn’t really seem to care if his story line becomes increasingly preposterous in the novel’s second half. His aim is to serve as an entertaining tour guide to the theme park-reality show that he calls Miami. Unlike his earlier novels, Back to Blood doesn’t aspire to capture the zeitgeist of an era. Rather, the novel is content to give us an impressionistic portrait of Miami as a city of immigrants, where ethnicity – hence the novel’s title – heightens class tensions, a city whose population, the fictional mayor muses, “is more than 50 per cent recent immigrants,” where Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Colombians, Russians and Israelis jostle one another to get a foot on the ladder of the American dream, while those above them – the snobs, climbers, rich and superrich – are trying to scramble even higher.
Mr Wolfe’s mayor tells the chief of police that they’ll never succeed in making Miami a melting pot — “that’s not gonna happen, not in our lifetimes.” He also quotes a constituent who says: “In Miami, everybody hates everybody.” That line – “In Miami, everybody hates everybody” – pretty much sums up Mr Wolfe’s view of the city, and it also describes the motor powering his entertaining but flawed new novel.
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BACK TO BLOOD
Tom Wolfe
Little, Brown and Company
704 pages; $30
©2012 The New York Times News Service