We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“BACK TO BLOOD” by Tom Wolfe (Jonathan Cape / Random House,
$NZ37:99)
Whatever
happened to Tom Wolfe, that funny little man who affects a white suit and hat?
Born in 1931, he’ll be 82 next birthday. So he clearly isn’t any longer the
sprightly “new journalist” who amused us as teenagers in the 1960s and 70s with
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak
Catchers. These were books which thumbed their noses at inane pop culture,
ridiculed the fashion for recreational drug-taking, and deflated the
pretensions and trendy concerns of the liberal part of the American rich. Wolfe
got away with such unfashionable attitudes because his writing itself was so
fresh and nimble.
Nor is Wolfe any longer the
earnest, celebratory chap who wrote The
Right Stuff, a rousing hymn of praise to the U.S. of A.’s early space
programme. Tom Wolfe has earned his place as a witty, waspish, conservative
journalist, buoyed by his ability to coin phrases that have become cultural
shorthand (“radical chic” and “the right stuff” among them).
But in the last couple of
decades, he’s taken it into his head to write novels. Big novels with big casts
of characters and with a tendency to batter, wallop and bruise their readers
with his satire. Novels that cover a broad social scene. I cannot comment on
his I Am Charlotte Simmons, because I
haven’t read it (apparently it’s an attack on the destructive nature of current
sexual mores). But I have read The Bonfire
of the Vanities (1987), which looks at the ethnic and cultural mix that is
New York. And I have read A Man in Full
(1998), which looks at the ethnic and cultural mix that is Atlanta. And now we
have Back to Blood, which looks at
the ethnic and cultural mix that is Miami. All of them are doorstoppers. Back to Blood comes in at 700 pages.
I am not being sardonic in noting
them thus. I have been amused by, and enjoyed, some of Wolfe’s novels, and
looking back at the newspaper review I wrote of A Man in Full when it first appeared, I see I was quite
enthusiastic about it. But for good or ill, the Wolfe novelistic template is
now quite firmly established and may be getting rather tired. Wolfe homes in on
a major American city, researches its fads, fashions and demographics, and then
creates a plot that brings ethnic or cultural communities into conflict – or at
least shows how little they really see one another’s viewpoint. Along the way,
varieties of modishness are mocked, intellectuals are ticked off for pandering
to the herd, and there are detailed descriptions of neighbourhoods and eateries
and museums and other establishments, to display how the different communities
behave en masse. The list-making,
physical-detail-noting journalist is in cahoots with the novelist, which isn’t
always a bad thing. (Wolfe claims one of his heroes is Zola, who sometimes used
similar techniques).
But the
main mechanism of Wolfe’s plots is always the irreducible difference between
racial communities. He is the anti-“melting
pot” satirist of America, constantly telling us that no government
programme, do-gooding liberal scheme or welfare system will ever prevent ethnic
groups from thinking of themselves as something separate from, and possibly
inimical to, other American citizens.
The theme
is sounded early in Back to Blood
when a crotchety WASP newspaper editor reflects on Miami’s different clans in
the passage that gives the novel its title:
“Everybody… all of them… it’s back to
blood! Religion is dying… but everybody has to believe in something.
It would be intolerable – you couldn’t stand it – to finally have to say to
yourself, ‘Why keep pretending? I’m nothing but a random atom inside a
supercollider known as the universe.’ But believing in by definition
means blindly, irrationally, doesn’t it? So, my people, that leaves only
our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies, to unite us. ‘La
Raza!’ as the Puerto Ricans cry out. ‘The Race!’ cries the whole
world. All people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their
minds – Back to blood!” (Pg.22)
According
to Wolfe, this perspective is even more evident in Miami because its different
ethnic clans are recent arrivals. Much later in the novel, a Cuban mayor ticks
off a black police chief with these words:
“Cy, I want to tell you a couple of things about this city. These are
things you probably already know, but sometimes it helps to hear them out
loud…. Miami is the only city in the world, as far as I can tell – in the world
– whose population is more than fifty percent recent immigrants… recent
immigrants, immigrants from over the past fifty years… and that’s a hell of a
thing when you think about it. So what does that give you? It gives you – I was
talking to a woman about this the other day, a Haitian lady, and she says to
me, ‘Dio, if you really want to understand Miami, you got to realize one thing
first of all. In Miami, everybody hates everybody.’ ” (Pg.424)
And this tends to be Wolfe’s own
view.
Plot: Nestor Comacho, an
American-born Cuban cop, manages to carry a Cuban refugee down from the very
tall mast of a yacht where he is perching, and deliver him into the hands of
immigration officials. For this feat he is hailed as a hero in Miami’s Anglo
press. But Miami’s Cuban press see him as a traitor to the race, because he has
prevented a Cuban refugee from getting the automatic residency he would have
won, had he made it to the shore. Later, the same Nestor Comacho arrests a
thuggish black drug-dealer, and again is hailed as a hero by his fellow cops.
But in the arrest he was filmed hurling racial insults at the criminal. The
clip features on Youtube and in no time he is being denounced as a racist bigot
who hates African-Americans. Big repercussions follow in both media and city
government; and the divide between Cuban-Americans and African-Americans is
revealed.
Running
alongside this are the adventures of Nestor’s former girlfriend Magdalena as
she endures being nurse to a perverted psychiatrist, and then mistress to a
Russian gangster running a big art scam from Miami’s growing Russian enclave.
It is hard
to take seriously the characterization of these two Candide-like people –
Nestor going, wide-eyed, from hero to villain to hero; Magdalena by turns a
rampant nymphomaniac on the make and a very moral girl deploring the corruption
around her, changing whenever it suits Wolfe’s plot.
Wolfe revisits here many of the
things he has targeted in his other novels. The dumbing-down of university
courses (especially in the humanities) to accommodate an ethnic quota.
Meaningless sex - he goes over the top with an orgy scene at a regatta, and
later repeats the process as he explores a strip club which doubles as a
brothel. Trendy psychiatric treatments – in this case a shrink who treats
“pornography addiction” but laughs at his patients behind their backs and
secretly salivates over the same things that turn them on. At one point (pp.559
ff) a cynical Russian describes psychotherapists as con-men who live by making
their patients dependent on them, a view that Wolfe apparently endorses. Wolfe
also takes pot-shots at the sheer crassness of the social scene, Russian
gangsterism, the artificial and arranged “reality” of “reality television”, and
the type of baying hysteria that can be whipped up by Youtube.
Art is one of Wolfe’s obsessions,
so he also engages with the way pornography has corrupted art; the way art has
become a commodity for the rich, who are more interested in investment than in
anything else; and therefore the way the leisure classes are conned into seeing
all manner of trash as art. Witness Candide-Nestor at an art-gallery
ruminating, with Wolfe’s obvious approval:
“What was it with all these reverent voices?....as if the [art gallery]
were a church or a chapel. There must have been sixty or seventy people in the
two rooms. They huddled reverently before this painting and that painting, the
faithful did, and they communed…. Communed with what?... Wassily Kandinsky’s
ascendant soul?... or with the Art itself, Art the All-in-One?... it beat
Nestor… These people treated art like a religion. The difference was that you
could get away with joking about religion… You only had to thin of all the ways
people played with the Lord, the Saviour, Heaven, Hell, the Outer Darkness,
Satan, the Choirs of Angels, Purgatory, the Messiah, Creeping Jesus…. For
humorous effect… In fact, there were plenty of people who wouldn’t feel
comfortable using them seriously… whereas with Art you didn’t dare make fun of
it… it was serious stuff… if you went around making would-be funny remarks…. obviously
you were a paluro…. A simpleton…a meathead unable to detect the
self-demeaning clumsiness of your sacrilege…” (Pg.637)
I suppose I
can applaud some of Wolfe’s satire and the targets he chooses to demolish, but
there are moments when he comes perilously close to old-fart-ism. Is it any
accident that the novel begins with a newspaper editor outraged that somebody
younger steals his parking space? Surely this is a scene that will resonate
most with somebody whose arteries are hardening. And what about the frequent
explicit anatomical descriptions of sexually-attractive young women? I know
Wolfe is critical of sexual attitudes, sex commodified, sex debased, sex as
public display; so he would probably justify these descriptions as part of his
over-all satire. But they do usually come across as gratuitous teases for the
reader.
One very
subsidiary theme is false charity – i.e. good works carried out by the wealthy
as a means of showing off their bounty. Of a modish professor’s daughter, Wolfe
writes:
“She was at the age, twenty-one, when a girl’s heart is filled to the
brim with charity and love for the little people. She was still too young and
unsophisticated to be told that her South Beach Outreach pity for the poor was
actually a luxury for someone like her. It meant that her family had enough
money an standing to be able to afford Good Works.” (Pg.179)
This is very much Wolfe
revisiting Radical Chic from
forty-plus years ago, when he ridiculed the fashionable rich for supporting
radical causes simply to gain social cachet. But at some point one has to
wonder whether Wolfe is shooting the wrong target. Is there any word in any of
his work in praise of charity or good works per se? Nope. Essentially he sees
the charitable as either fools or poseurs; and while he is doubtless accurate
in terms of the limited social scene he depicts, this still come across as
somebody finding excuses to damn all good works. It’s a rather comfortable sort
of satire for well-off people who don’t want to have to share their wealth. The
well-off people probably include the novelist who, according to news reports,
received a publishers’ advance of some millions of dollars to write Back to Blood.
I really
take the same view of Wolfe’s overriding theme of incompatible ethnic
communities. Yes, it’s very funny indeed that, in a multi-ethnic society,
euphemisms are often used in public to paper over the realities of race
relations. But satire which focuses on this is really the satire of an Anglo annoyed
that society does now have to be pluralist and accommodate many different
peoples.
I give
Wolfe one major point. He is readable and it is easy to whizz through his 700
pages. But, boy, does he like to OVERUSE CAPITAL LETTERS and SHOUT AT US with many
EXCLAMATION POINTS when he fears we might fall asleep!!!!!!