Back to Friday Reads and
Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe! Library Director Adam Pellman tells us about his current summer read.
Tom Wolfe's
The Bonfire of the Vanities is considered by many to be the quintessential American novel of the 1980s, a big, sprawling NYC-set satire that sets its sights on the decade's materialism and excess, not to mention that city's racial and ethnic tensions. He tried to write another decade-defining novel in the 1990s with
A Man in Full, another big, sprawling story about the foibles of a wealthy man. I thought both of those books were great, so I've decided belatedly to tackle Wolfe's novel of the 2010s,
Back to Blood. It has many of the same hallmarks from his earlier novels (the satirical tone, the big cast of broadly-written characters, the thematic preoccupations with class, power, money, race, politics, and the press), but in this case, he's swapped Bonfire's NYC melting pot for the sun-baked, multicultural metropolis of Miami, Florida.
While the main character of
Back to Blood is Cuban American Miami police officer Nestor Camacho, who ends up in hot water with both the Cuban and African American communities after two high-profile incidents on the job, Wolfe devotes plenty of attention to the many other characters who populate his story: WASP journalists; Cuban politicians; cops; Russian oligarchs; a Haitian college professor and his two children; and a fame-hungry psychiatrist and his Latina nurse, who also happens to be Nestor's ex-girlfriend. So far, it's highly entertaining, even if it doesn't quite reach the same heights as
Bonfire.
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