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.
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