Holy Hialeah, Batman!!!

The latest Tom Wolfe is, well, Tom Wolfe.  Back to Blood isn’t short, and it can’t and shouldn’t be taken seriously.  It reads like a comic book, and it’s lots of fun.  The overall plot isn’t particularly interesting or believable, but each chapter is a set piece, like a scene in a play.  Each  has a setup and a dramatic (often overly dramatic) climax.  The language is action packed and over the top, but not in any pretentious way. Lots of all-caps, made up words to represent sounds, some profanity, plenty of exclamation points … you get the picture.  You can’t even take the character names seriously. There’s a minor character, a fat man, whose last name is Belli.  Another minor character is a stylist, i.e. makeup artist, named is Maria Zitspoppen. 

 

A real circus: and here's the ringmaster.

Many of Wolfe’s pet peeve issues reappear in the book: the fakery (in Wolfe’s view) of most modern art, violent clashes between races and economic strata, ignorance in high places, selfishness that masquerades as charity, lust that presents as professional expertise.  It’s all on display here, and in Technicolor.

The story takes place in Miami, and just as Bonfire of theVanities was in one sense a portrait of New York City at that time, this is a portrait of today’s Miami.  And it’s not a pretty picture.  As usual, it’s pretty much a catalog of The Seven Deadly Sins, with a few more tossed in for good measure.  Don’t look here for any real heroes, or any relationships between characters that might be generous and loving. That would be far outside the purview of Wolfe’s intensely cynical outlook. Or for that matter don’t look for any complexity or depth in these characters either.

But here and there there’s a wink from the author, as if he’s silently and slyly admitting to us that he’s exaggerating, that it really isn’t so bad, that he’s just doing his best to entertain us.  So read it with a smile.  Bring on the dancing bear, the chorus girls, the strong man, the dwarf, and the incredible fire eater.  There’s plenty of evil to go around, but in the end it’s pretty much harmless comic-book evil.  Gosh, if any of this were truly believable there really is no hope.  I’ll go with the wink, thank you.