Back to Blood

Back to Blood – by Tom Wolfe

If you’ve never read a book by Tom Wolfe, it might be hard for someone who HAS read his books to describe his writing to you.   Here’s my attempt: Tom Wolfe writes like he dresses.  His picture on the back of this book will serve my example just fine.  (If you don’t have a physical copy of the book, just do a Google.) His writing style is loud, boorish, over the top, flashy, flamboyant, and overall overbearing.  Still, though, under all of that glamour and glitz is actual substance.  Whether uncovering all the schmaltz to actually find it is worth it – well – that’s up to the individual reader. This is probably why there are so many that pass on his books whenever his name is brought up. 

Personally, I usually like all the flashy elements he includes since this makes Mr. Wolfe a tad unique and helps him stand out in the literary crowd. But in the case of this book, I confess that I was too overwhelmed with all of his colorful elements and enhancements.  He could have easily cut 200 of the 700 pages of this book and told the exact same story.  Yes, SOME enhancements and adjectives are good, but in the case here -  hooooboy.

I recall one scene where a couple of the main characters are tracking another character.  Their pursuit takes them into a strip club in Miami (where the story is based).  So before we read about anything substantial about the particular search, we have to endure a couple of pages of what the music in the club sounds like, a couple of pages of being told what everyone in the club is wearing, a couple more pages of what the strippers are NOT wearing….and on and on and on.   I confess there were times when I would just skim through certain sections.  It was all a bit much.

In another scene, we meet a young woman and her brother who become a substantial part of the story, but before Wolfe introduces us to them, we’re introduced to their father.  Wolfe then drones on and on about this particular man including all of his eccentric idiosyncrasies for several pages.  Once we finally meet the sister and brother, we never read about the father again. So we ask: what was the point?  Why waste so much page space on the father when he really has no relevance to the overall story?  I mean, it’s FINE to introduce the dad first and tell us a LITTLE bit about him, but for some reason Wolfe gives him tons of pages.  Again – hooooboy.

There is a decent story buried here. The story takes place in Miami which is quite the cultural melting pot.  One character in the book mentions that everybody in Miami hates everybody else in Miami that doesn’t look like himself.  How true that sentiment is in real life is beyond my scope, but it’s a fair description of all of the people within this novel.  Our main character is Nestor Camacho. Nestor is a 25 year-old Cuban police officer.  The problem with being a Cuban police officer in Miami is that when you apprehend another Cuban for breaking the law, the entire (quite large) Cuban community in Miami turns against you; including your family.  So this book details the many travails of poor Nestor and his attempts to redeem his reputation.

There’s a lot more people in the book, and many of these characters are the members of the elite Miami money. We meet lots of these ilk at private parties, expensive strip clubs, exclusive restaurants and snobby art museums.  We see these types often in Tom Wolfe books, and it’s quite obvious that Wolfe disdains such individuals. The way he writes about them, we don’t find much to like about them either; especially when Wolfe has a bizarre fetish of describing them all in long, nauseating detail.

So a lot of unnecessary accoutrements in a fairly straightforward story.  Again, this is par for the course for Tom Wolfe.  I’ll give him an ‘A’ for effort, but if had been his editor, I would have recommended that he tone it down several notches.