Back to Blood

by Tom Wolfe

Overview

A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now.

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay — with officer Nestor Camacho on board — Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night-until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the 'hoods, "de-skilled" conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, "spectators" at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night's orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an "Active Adult" condo, and a nest of shady Russians.

Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous bestselling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316036320
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	01/28/2014
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	768
Product dimensions:	4.20(w) x 7.40(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Back to Blood. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale. He received the National Book Foundation's 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

March 2, 1931

Place of Birth:

Richmond, Virginia

Education:

B.A. (cum laude), Washington and Lee University, 1951; Ph.D. in American Studies, Yale University, 1957

Website:

http://www.tomwolfe.com

Reading Group Guide

1. The title of Back to Blood's prologue, "We een Mee-AH-mee Now," is a Latina character's retort to a "gringa's" request that she speak English, because "YOU'RE IN AMERICA NOW!" How has your town or city changed due to its immigrant population? To what extent have the elements in its melting pot melted?
2. Tom Wolfe made a dozen extended trips to Miami over two years while researching Back to Blood. He has said that writers should "leave the desk" in order to gather material for their books, and he admires nineteenth-century naturalistic novelists like Balzac and Zola for having done so. What are some of this novel's memorable details that could have been learned and conveyed only by Wolfe's direct observation? Would you know how the neighborhood of Hialeah looks or what really goes on at the Biscayne Bay Columbus Day Regatta if he hadn't been there and told us?
3. One reviewer noted that Back to Blood is both "a breezy, funny read...and an examination of what it means to be a man." In what ways did you sympathize with Nestor Camacho as he struggles with his various identities as a cop, a Cuban American, and a young man on his own? Did you expect the happy endings for both his career and his love life?
4. Ghislaine Lantier's French Haitian American father is horrified by the prospect of his daughter's dating "a Cuban cop!" Discuss the ways in which Professor Lantier manifests both the meaning of the novel's title and the more general theme of people's strong drive to fit in and rise.
5. In an interview, Tom Wolfe has said, "People may complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. They don't think in essays." Does this strike you as true?
6. How do your thoughts about "de-skilled," "hands-free" art jibe with the narrator's? Were you aware of how much money was at stake in the current art world before reading Wolfe's rendition of Art Basel Miami? Did you know about the business of forgery in the art world?
7. Novelist Tibor Fischer, in a review of Back to Blood, wrote that "for bringing the world, or at least a world, to the page, Wolfe is the boss." And the books editor of the Miami Herald wrote that "flamboyance is Miami's native tongue....There is nothing in this novel that couldn't happen." Do these comments about the veracity of Back to Blood make you want to visit Miami or run the other way? Do you consider place ormilieu to be important to your enjoyment of a novel? Discuss.
8. Magdalena Otero takes many chances with her well-being in her constant striving to assimilate and move up in Miami's pecking order. Which of the minor characters also exhibit her preoccupation with status? Can you think of any who don't? Discuss social ambition as a theme of Back to Blood.
9. Tom Wolfe has said that one of the writers he most admires is John Steinbeck. Although the work of these two writers differs stylistically, both attest to Wolfe's belief that "no single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony." What is your response to that idea? How strongly do you think the individual is shaped by his society?

Editorial Reviews

What holds our attention in Back to Blood…are Mr. Wolfe's two main characters: Nestor Camacho…and his former girlfriend Magdalena…Although Mr. Wolfe can be patronizing 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 and Magdalena show that…Mr. Wolfe has been able to build upon the advances he made in creating flesh-and-blood people in A Man in Full (1998)—people who are not defined simply by their clothes, cars and verbal idiosyncrasies, but who actually possess something resembling an inner life.
—Michiko Kakutani

The New York Times

Two hundred pages into Wolfe's frantic potboiler about Miami's melting pot, a description of City Hall reminds readers of the vivid detail that made Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities) a literary icon. Yet despite flashes of "the right stuff", his latest novel comprises not an exposé of popular culture so much as a lurid compendium of clichés. The prologue features a scandal-fearing newspaper editor fretting as his wife tries to park her mini-hybrid at a trendy restaurant, but the action begins with marine patrolman Nestor Camacho speeding across Biscayne Bay. Unfortunately, his moment of glory dissolves into humiliation when he is condemned for arresting, after saving, a Cuban refugee. Resolute in pressing on, a bewildered Nestor works with reporter John Smith to unravel fraud at the city's new art museum and uncover the truth behind an incident of school violence. In the process, he meets elegant Haitian beauty Ghislaine, whose professor father desperately hopes she'll "pass" for white. African Americans, Russian émigrés, and Jewish retirees also appear: ethnic groups separated by language, tribe, and class; linked together by sex, money, and real estate. Filling his prose with sound effects, foreign phrases, accented English, and slang, Wolfe creates his own Miami sound machine—noisy, chaotic, infused with tropical rhythms, and fueled by the American dream. The result is a book louder than it is deep; more sensational than it is thought provoking; less like Wolfe at his best, more like tabloid headlines recast as fiction. (Oct. 23)

Publishers Weekly

PRAISE FOR TOM WOLFE:

Bonfire of the Vanities (1987):

"A big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let go."—New York Times Book Review

"A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right."—Washington Post Book World

A Man in Full (1998):

"The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written—not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist....The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting."—New York Times Book Review

I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):

"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel."—Lev Grossman, Time

"Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives."—Los Angeles Times

"Brilliant...I couldn't stop reading it....Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

From the Publisher

A soapy, gripping, and sometimes glib novel.”

New York Times

A shrewd, riling, and exciting tale of a volatile, divisive, sun-seared city where ‘everybody hates everybody.’”

Booklist (starred review)

Actor Lou Diamond Phillips does full justice to Wolfe’s sprawling, multicharacter novel of present day Miami, with its amazing mixture of ethnicities and cultures. He can handle Cubans, African Americans, Russians, Haitians, and even elderly retired New Yorkers with ease and authority.”

SoundCommentary.com

[Wolfe] has not lost his gift for panoramic presentation; Back to Blood surges with its large ensemble cast of Floridians and immigrants with mixed histories and conflicting agendas. This sun-bronzed band of sailors, crack dealers, art enthusiasts, porn addicts, insomniacs, and love-struck romantics keep the fiction bristling with meaning even as the action moves forward.”

editorial review Barnes & Noble

Actor Lou Diamond Phillips portrays Nestor Comacho, a man with both pride in his heritage and a thirst to be fully assimilated into America’s ever-changing culture. Ultimately, he performs a death-defying act that is perceived as heroic in the white community and as a betrayal in the Latin community. Phillips relishes the dramatic pauses and changes pace to match Nestor’s inner struggle and frustrations.”

AudioFile

Wolfe remains as skillful as ever in texturing the novel’s terrain, from the ‘prairie of concrete’ formed by Hialeah’s front yards to a tired retirement complex up in Broward County where ‘the little iron balconettes and the aluminum frames for the sliding doors looked as if they were about to fall off and die in a pile.”

New York Times Book Review

Wolfe, Master of the New Journalism Universe, has done his homework and done it well.”

Miami Herald

"Brilliant...I couldn't stop reading it....Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure."

Michael Dirda - Washington Post

"Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives."

Los Angeles Times

I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):

"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel."

Lev Grossman - Time

"A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right."

Washington Post Book World

"Wolfe is writing with as much brio as he brought to his debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, 25 years ago. Back to Blood demonstrates the author's persistent vitality."

Adam Langer - San Francisco Chronicle

"The novel roars and zips along like a cigarette boat, and even at 81 the Man in White proves to be a marvelous reporter. Call this bawdy humdinger the Bonfire of the Miamians."

Kyle Smith - People

"A breezy, funny read...and an examination of just what it means to be a man."

Sarah Fenske - LA Weekly

"Another big, sprawling, engrossing, hilarious, character-packed and action-driven novel by the master chronicler of modern America."

Bob Hoover - Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Back to Blood is a bracing vision of America's shifting demography and the immutability of ethnic conflict and class aspirations....Wolfe demonstrates that his skills as a novelist and a chronicler of America's class anxieties are undiminished."

Michael Moynihan - The Daily Beast

"A typically overstuffed, overstated, delectably over-the-top portrait of modern Miami."

Dale Singer - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A rollicking good story. Akin to The Bonfire of the Vanities, the book has memorable characters and big themes."

Ken Armstrong - Seattle Times

"With the sweep, particularity, and deliciously flamboyant language that have become Wolfe trademarks, Back to Blood tackles Miami and environs. Wolfeian description is seldom just pretty writing--almost always, the physical environment tells the person, tells the society."

John Timpane - Philadelphia Enquirer

"Preposterous, overwrought, contrived, wildly ambitious, and outrageously entertaining. It is, in other words, classic Wolfian fare."

Husna Huq - Christian Science Monitor

"The premier 19^th-century novelist of the 21^st century, the thin white duke of American neon prose, Tom Wolfe may be the last of the literary showmen in the era of mopers and trauma specialists. Wolfe shows no signs of slackening energy or ambition in his latest novel, Back to Blood."

James Wolcott - Vanity Fair

"Immensely entertaining and insightful. Nobody does hedonism and excess like Miami, and Wolfe has managed to wrangle all of his observations into an expansive book that despite its huge cast avoids becoming unruly."

William McKeen - Boston Sunday Globe

"The novel's pointed observations are dangerously close to reality: Wolfe, Master of the New Journalism Universe, has done his homework and done it well. There is nothing in the novel that couldn't happen tomorrow right outside your window."

Connie Ogle - Miami Herald

I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):

"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel.

Lev Grossman - Time Magazine

Brilliant...I couldn't stop reading it....Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure.
— Washington Post

Michael Dirda

I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):

"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel.
— Time

Lev Grossman

Within a masterfully strategized plot, Wolfe works his sardonic mojo to mock both prejudice and decadence and demolish the art world, reality TV, tawdry fame, and journalism in the digital age....This is a shrewd, riling, and exciting tale of a volatile, diverse, sun-seared city where 'everybody hates everybody.'
— Booklist (Starred Review)

Donna Seaman

Former new journalist and documenter of America’s social evolution in bestsellers like BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES and THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST, Tom Wolfe casts his magnifying glass on Miami in his new novel. Actor Lou Diamond Phillips portrays Nestor Comacho, a man with both pride in his heritage and a thirst to be fully assimilated into America’s ever-changing culture. Ultimately, he performs a death-defying act that is perceived as heroic in the white community and as a betrayal in the Latin community. Phillips relishes the dramatic pauses and changes pace to match Nestor’s inner struggle and frustrations. Wolfe’s attention to detail and the milieu of Miami make this a “shouldn’t-miss” proposition. R.O. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2012 - AudioFile