In 1968, at the high-tide of the counterculture, I opened The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test on a
Friday and finished it over the weekend. Most probably (I no longer remember), I
ignored assigned school reading on the same weekend. The book details the
adventures of Ken Kesey (author of One
Flew over The Cuckoo’s Nest) and the Merry Pranksters on their
cross-country tour in the psychedelic bus Further.
The reviewer for The New York Times,
Eliot Fremont Smith, commented at the time, "The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test is not
simply the best
book on the hippies, it is the essential book.” So it was,
and is. Tom Wolfe brought his creative, exuberant, and off-beat
style to his reportage, capturing images, dialogue, perspectives, fashions, and
tone perfectly. Ever since that weekend, Tom Wolfe steadily has expanded his
territory on my bookshelves.
Wolfe’s nonfiction (e.g The
Right Stuff) reads very much like fiction; yet, not until he was 54 years
old did he write a novel, The Bonfire of
the Vanities. Appropriately enough, The
Bonfire of the Vanities reads very much like nonfiction. In this dark, cynical,
but funny book, Wolfe captured the social milieu of ‘80s New York so well that he
uncannily presaged the Bernie Goetz affair in his plot. The book, by the way,
should not be judged by the 1990 movie, which was nominated
for five Golden Raspberry Awards: Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Actress,
Worst Supporting Actress, and Worst Screenplay. (For all that, the movie has
acquired a cult cachet in recent years.) Wolfe’s next novel A Man in Full dissects the adolescent (or, more properly, primate) social jockeying of players in the debt-driven prosperity of
the ‘90s, as they dance on the fence-top between opportunity and disaster,
success and jail. I am Charlotte Simmons
in 2004 was a spot-on depiction of prevailing values and youth culture on
college campuses. In this novel, Wolfe once again was prophetic. At the
fictional Dupont University
In 2012 the octogenarian Wolfe shows he is not ready to hang
up his keyboard. His latest novel, Back
to Blood, is set in Miami, the most ethnically diverse city in an ever more
diverse America. The blood of the title refers to bloodline, not blood spatter.
(Tom leaves spatter to Jeff Lindsay and Dexter.) An underlying theme: despite (or because of) the intermingling of Haitians,
Nicaraguans, Cubans, Russians, African-Americans, Anglos, etc., ethnic and racial
consciousness infuses everything – often subtly, but sometimes by megaphone –
in politics, on the job, and in personal relations. Individuals are rarely just
individuals. One character, a newspaper editor on the ever-more-irrelevant Miami Herald, mulls to himself about
this: “Everybody…all of them…it’s back to blood! Religion is dying…but
everybody still 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 item inside a
supercollider known as the universe. But believing
in something by definition means blindly,
irrationally, doesn’t it.” The plot involves
a pornography addiction therapist, a Russian billionaire who might have donated
forged paintings to a museum, and a hero Cuban cop who is reviled by his own
family because he rescued but then helped arrest a Cuban refugee off-shore
(automatic asylum applies only to Cubans who first touch land). The portrait of
Miami (and not just Miami ) that emerges is detailed and
convincing; the image is far from pleasant, but it is entertaining.
Upshot: a thumbs up
for Back to Blood. One only can hope
that this novel, too, is not prophetic.
Tom Has a Friend on
YouTube
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