Back to Blood

I've always enjoyed Tom Wolfe's writing and, with the exception of a short piece here and there, I've read all of it. His new novel, alas, demonstrates that he has lost it. Back to Blood is a series of researched, fictionalized anecdotes carried out by plywood characters. No matter how mightily Wolfe labors to breathe life into these people, they do not live. If this book were cleared of Wolfe's tics and presented as an anonymous work, I doubt anyone would publish it. There are many embarrassing moments showing that this 81-year-old man, no matter how many guided tours he takes, cannot capture contemporary experience. A character "iPhones" someone else, a usage I've never heard once. In one scene, a doctor supposedly carries out a "takedown" of a 60 Minutes reporter. But the interview shows nothing of the kind. The "Grand Inquisitor" is reduced to a mumbling mess, but the doctor has done next to nothing to demolish him. The scene falls utterly flat.

Throughout, there is a mixture of sawdust stuffing ("It was lunchtime, and students were coming out of the building and heading here and going there") and cluelessness ("Nestor happened to look at the big glass case he was beside -- and what the hell was that? Those shelves didn't just have pastries and cookies, they had wrapped up foods..."). The second quote is from a scene in which a 25-year-old policeman is supposed to be flabbergasted by his first trip to a Starbucks.

In Hooking Up, published in 2000, Wolfe was already lost. The "trends" he cited there were either over, peripheral, or nonexistent. Since then he's only fallen further behind. Back to Blood is a sad denouement to a worthy career. Or, as the saying goes, there's no fool like an old fool.