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" Published in the November 2012 issue It&amp;#039;s hard to ignore the man in the white suit. That&amp;#039;s due partly to the threads and mostly to the fact that Tom Wolfe has spent the last 50 years being right about stuff. In the &amp;#039;60s, Wolfe&amp;#039;s journalism anticipated the volume of our present tense. Hyperactive, kinetic, happy to exaggerate in order to make its point. LOUD and Technicolored and TOTALLY IN YOUR FACE!!! He presciently nailed both the logic and the favored rhetoric of our infotainment age: one part cable news, one part reality television, and lots of parts talk radio. In the &amp;#039;70s and &amp;#039;80s, Wolfe kept getting things right. He was right in observing that Americans loved and feared nothing so much as their own reflection. He predicted that divorce would come to be seen as no big deal, that men would trade in their wives as they did their cars, that they wouldn&amp;#039;t be thought of as assholes for doing so. At the height of America&amp;#039;s melancholia, in the gloom of the Ford and Carter years, Wolfe saw a renewed interest in the idea of American exceptionalism, in feel-good depictions of men with crew cuts performing tasks that required guts and know-how. The Right Stuff is Wolfe at his rightest. It predicts both the iconography and the themes upon which Reagan built his legacy. Wolfe rolled out The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987. It was his first and best work of fiction. As literature, it&amp;#039;s nothing special. Pretty hokey stuff. However, as a guide to what New York would look like in the years after it was published, the book is mostly on target: a city in which everyone is out to grab as much money and power as they can, and to do so by whatever means necessary. Wolfe suggests that this is not only the way things are but probably the best they can be. Right on. But the problem with being right about so many things is that it can trick you into thinking you&amp;#039;re right about everything. And in his new novel about Miami, Back to Blood (Little, Brown, $30), Tom Wolfe demonstrates as much by getting it wrong. As sociology, Back to Blood is about as convincing as an undergrad&amp;#039;s term paper. As a crime novel, it&amp;#039;s about as compelling as a Matlock re-rerun. In short, Back to Blood is wrong. Bad. Or as Wolfe would write, BAAADDD!!!!!!! The problems are clear from the outset. Wolfe opens with a Wasp couple driving downtown to meet friends at a happening restaurant called Balzac&amp;#039;s. This is wrong on both fronts. As in: A) There are no Wasps in Miami. And B) Finding a restaurant in Miami named after a 19th-century French novelist is about as likely as finding a bar in South Boston named Goldstein&amp;#039;s. It could happen. But really, it just doesn&amp;#039;t. For Wolfe, however, these considerations are beside the point. Balzac&amp;#039;s is the name of the restaurant because Wolfe wants to invite the comparison. They are Wasps because they need to be shocked by the Latina who swipes their parking spot. Wolfe spends a lot of time in Back to Blood describing how shocked people are by one another&amp;#039;s behavior. They are left &amp;quot;agog&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;sputtering.&amp;quot; Their eyes bulge out. Perhaps this is how it goes in Wolfe&amp;#039;s neck of the woods, but in Miami, a place where a naked man recently ate another man&amp;#039;s face, nothing&amp;#039;s shocking. In this town, one is shocked by the strange ways of other people only if one hasn&amp;#039;t been here very long. Similarly, there are no characters in Back to Blood, only caricatures, cartoonish stereotypes that are little more than reflections of their sociocultural contexts. The Cuban cop who loves his pastelitos. The preppy reporter with all the right credentials. The Hialeah honey with a heart of gold and a pussy like a papaya. In Back to Blood, Wolfe comes across as a white guy explaining brown people to a room full of white guys. Sure, he burns pages giving his readers access to these characters&amp;#039; interiors, but once he&amp;#039;s given you the sociological stats (age, gender, race, occupation) there&amp;#039;s really no need for it. Anything Wolfe tells you about what his characters are thinking are things you could&amp;#039;ve guessed from the jump. Not a one of them seems capable of an ambiguous or contradictory thought. Bankers think about money. Ball players think about ball. Astronauts think about flight. And if they are not thinking about these things, they are probably thinking about getting their dick sucked. Maybe that&amp;#039;s how things work in the real world. You don&amp;#039;t make lots of money without thinking about money all the time. But in the pages of Back to Blood, this kind of thing makes for an awfully long slog, a deeply unconvincing group portrait. What Wolfe does get right \u2014 the heat, the beach, the neighborhoods \u2014 is the kind of stuff you can pick up over the course of a couple weekends. Or from Wikipedia. It&amp;#039;s not the kind of deep reporting that Wolfe prides himself on. If it was, Wolfe would know first and foremost that Miami isn&amp;#039;t New York. Or Atlanta. Or San Francisco. Wolfe knows this. And then again, not really, or not nearly as well as he ought. For Wolfe, every place is the same place. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter if it&amp;#039;s Brooklyn or Buckhead or a college campus somewhere in North Carolina. Only the scenery changes. Wolfe has got these disparate and complex worlds all figured out. But that&amp;#039;s easy to do when one views all worlds as a collection of monkeys pissing on monkeys, of thick-necked heroes imposing their will upon a schoolyard packed with pussies. If one doesn&amp;#039;t see the world quite this way, it&amp;#039;s not because the world is more varied and more complex than Wolfe would allow but rather because you yourself are pencil-necked. You&amp;#039;ve been hoodwinked by a graduate degree in the humanities. If you don&amp;#039;t see the world Wolfe&amp;#039;s way, Wolfe will show you. Not in the lives and happenings of fully formed characters, not in events that seem likely or even plausible, but in CAPS LOCK, in more exclamation points than you had ever thought possible. Maybe Wolfe&amp;#039;s right. Maybe this is the world we live in. But I&amp;#039;m not convinced. I don&amp;#039;t think the world that Wolfe depicts exists anywhere outside of the elementary-school playground or maybe some superchic Manhattan bo\u00CEte called Balzac&amp;#039;s. I imagine Wolfe has spent a lot of time considering the workings of such places. But the existence of such places does not preclude the differing realities of other places, places that play by an entirely different set of rules. Wolfe should take these terra incognitas more seriously. He should spend some time in them. Get to know them. He might learn something. Serious. The guy needs to get out more. THE CULTURE BLOG: Stephen Marche on Tom Wolfe &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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