*Back to Blood

bc back to blood

SMACK, like Wolfe or not, he finds the SMACK in our microcosm and just runs with it.   In “Back to Blood,”  Wolfe turns his attention to Miami and the influx of Cubans who have shaded the once White-Protestant domain.  Wolfe centers his attention on the racial divides between Miami’s new inhabitants, the Cubans and Russians, and the old guard.

The novel begins with Nestor Camacho (a Cuban American).  He is a new police officer assigned on water patrol  with his blond hair, blue-eyed commanding officers.  He is told to retrieve a Cuban refugee off an adjoining ship.  The refugee claims the ship’s tall mast and Nestor is told to get him down.  Nestor uses his well-honed physical strength to muscle his way up the mast and pull the refugee down wrapped in this legs as he inches down the mast line.  He is being filmed by a local TV station.  On the bridge that the refugee was trying to get to were numerous people screaming at Nestor to let the refugee step foot on land so he didn’t have to go back to Cuba.  Nestor had to do his job, and he was proud of his physical ability and the high-fives his fellow police officers gave him.  When Nestor got home, his family turned on him and his father refused to speak to him.  If things couldn’t get any worse, his girlfriend, Magdalena, breaks up with him.

Nestor will have another turn on TV on YouTube when him and his boss try to arrest a drug dealer and things go bad quickly.  The video was filmed at the end of the clash and didn’t show the dealer trying to kill the officers, it only showed racial slurs and blows by the police officers.

Wolfe’s onomatopoeic language throughout the book can be irritating.  He is spot on with it, but too much is too much.

The other characters thrown in the mix to add even more color include Dr. Norman Lewis, an upperly- mobile psychiatrist specializing in porn addiction.    He makes fun of all his clients, but secretly likes to watch the porn himself.  His biggest client (socially) is Maurice Fleischmann.  Nestor’s ex-girlfriends ends up with Dr. Lewis for a time before she makes the huge leap to the badass Russian, Sergei Korolyov.

I don’t know that “Back to Blood,” is the best book for book clubs.  I would have loved to talk about this with my book club, but don’t think they’d like it.  They enjoy character driven works.  You can have philosophical conversations about everything from the new immigrants refusal to learn English to our racial prejudices. I found James Wood of The New Yorker’s review on this book helpful before I bought the book (see my October 2013 post for the link).

As always Enjoy!

Rating: 7.5

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