Tom Wolfe’s New Novel Focuses on Miami
Tom Wolfe, author of such notable literary works as “The Right Stuff” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” is working on a new book about immigration in America that focuses on Miami. The novel titled “Back to Blood” is a look at “class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America’s future has arrived first.”
It seems we’ve read something along those lines before. Thirty years ago Playboy Magazine writer Peter Ross Range wrote of our wonderful city, “Miami is the model for the American dream.” Unfortunately that sentence came at the end of a five paragraph dissertation on $20 blow-jobs, sex in the bushes, chicken hawks face-fucking young boys, hookers urinating in the mouths of conventioneers, and (maybe worst of all) Anita Bryant. (Playboy 12/1978)
Let’s hope Wolfe’s new book presents a somewhat kinder view of Miami’s role in the American dream…
The major characters in Wolfe’s book are a “young nurse of Cuban ancestry,” a “second-generation Cuban police officer,” and “a woman of Haitian background who passes for Anglo.” (What?…no club promoters?)
Why did he choose Miami for a book on immigration? Wolfe tells the Wall Street Journal, ”As far as I know, it’s the only city in the world in which more than half the population is recent immigrants. They run Miami politically. This is a situation in which there is one collision of racial and ethnic groups after another. You don’t have to make up anything. You don’t dare. The imagination is scrawny compared to what goes on down there.”
Says Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, “There will be a lot of interest in how he takes what Miami is and how he spins it. Anybody who reads Tom Wolfe knows it will be his vision. But I don’t know that any one person can get to the heart of the reality of south Florida today.”
Ain’t it the truth.
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