Tom Wolfe is an American writer, best known for The Bonfire of the Vanities - a sensation in the late 80's (made into a terrible film with Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith.). One of the most culturally significant figures in the 60's after publication of his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he is credited with introducing the terms The Me Decade, Radical Chic, and The Right Stuff to pop culture. The only book of his I had read previously was The Painted Word, a social history of modern art.
Back To Blood is his fourth novel, set in the mixed up melting pot that is Miami, and it's Absolutely Terrible. Should I underline that? I would say it's unreadably bad, as I - with an open mind and hoping for a intelligent read - looked on in wonder, stumped that something so vacuous, pointless, and without interest could be published. Aren't there people at the publishing house who could go over this and fix it up a bit before it comes out - or - did he even write it? Perhaps a ghostwriter did and they added his name on the cover? I pushed on through 250 pages of the 700+ (giving it far more of a chance than most), determined to find something in it, before giving up. Awful.
It's about Cuban immigrants to Miami. Nestor and his family living in a Cuban ghetto, his girlfriend Magdalena who works for a doctor who helps those with porn addictions, a reporter named John Smith who is trying to break the story about art fraud by millionaires, something about a high-powered Russian involved in it all. The characters were so surface thin they were nearly floating above the page and the ridiculous over use of :::::exclamation marks!::::: make the sentences seem naive and silly. The situations had no depth or reality. It's actually worse than a Jackie Collins novel, not the category he believes he is with John Updike or John Irving. (At least with Jackie, we both know it's just a salacious read). Wolfe compares his writing to documenters of contemporary society such as John Steinbeck or Charles Dickens.
From what I see online, disappointing sales and tepid response made his publisher decline the 7 million asking price, so he found another publisher. Released to mixed reviews, it was a commercial failure (the copies sold compared to his large fee made each book cost approximately $112. per reader.) The publisher states "It's Tom Wolfe writing the kind of novel that only Tom Wolfe among the living American writers can do" - which sounds like praise but actually says nothing.
Completely out of touch and shallow. The New York Times says in it's review "Some will judge this to be artistically insufficient". Yes, that's right. Stunningly unreadable.
2012 / Hardcover / 704 pages
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