It would be fair to say that measured restraint or delicate, whispered nuance have never held too much interest for Tom Wolfe as a writer. He likes his America extremely loud and incredibly close. Now, at 81, the most vivid literary huckster of our times seems more thrilled than ever to crank up his volume. Back to Blood often reads like a novel for the hard of hearing, megaphone meets ear trumpet. You hesitate to say it is a rage against the dying of the light, since, having invented this register 50 years ago in his wonderful pyrotechnic journalism, Wolfe has been writing in it pretty much ever since. Still, this book is certainly among the shoutiest – and just possibly the last – of his comic bullhorn broadsides against soft-spoken liberal pieties.
The novel is more than 700 pages long, though you guess about 100 of those are taken up with punctuation. To his familiar bulimia of exclamation marks, Wolfe gorges here unexpectedly on colons, often throwing in a couple of dozen at a time, just because he can. Even for seasoned Wolfe-readers it takes a little while to reacclimatise to the exclamatory style – like being woken up at three in the morning in a strange hotel room by a blaring shock-jock talk show. The opening paragraphs add a new contender to the author's personal top 10 of headbanging intros: a speedboat is ripping across the harbour in Miami, and the description and talk of the three cops on board is interrupted every half a dozen words by the repetitive SMACK of the hull on the water. It's a typically self-conscious reader's health warning: hold on tight, Wolfe loves to yell, theatrically grinning from the wheel above the frothy tumult of his sentences, it could be a wild ride.
I interviewed the author in his hushed and punctilious Manhattan apartment when he was setting out on the journey of this novel four years ago. He had not long returned from one of the first of his white-suited fact-finding missions to Florida and was full of excited talk of Miami's racial politics out of which Back to Blood would emerge. "I'm still convinced that if you went to live anywhere in this country for 30 days you would see sides of life you didn't think possible!" he suggested. His curiosity clearly remained on full-wattage in subsequent visits to Miami but for all his closely reported detail – the novel, as ever, takes great pride in its observation of the tribal fashions of his characters, the particular $29.99 CVS shades favoured by river police, or the slang of brattish yacht-partying thong-worshipping teens – Wolfe likes to work with big themes.
The high-rev engine of this book engages with the implications of the great migration of Cubans to America's southernmost metropolis, and the reversion of white "anglo" culture to a dwindling minority voice, drowned out also by robust African American and Haitian and incoming Russian inflections. This politically fraught recipe – which gives the insistent bloodlines of the title – is salted with sex, which is no great respecter of cultural divides and which drives the action forward.
From the large cast of characters on which Wolfe's eye lights – the city's Hispanic mayor, its black police chief, the wimpish and sweating editor of the desperate Miami Herald and the inevitable Russian oligarch – his narrative comes to focus on a particular young second generation Cuban emigré, Nestor Camacho. Comacho is a young cop who barely speaks a word of his parents' Spanish but nevertheless inhabits an America quite distinct from his "americanos" colleagues; it is a divide that begins with body-shape: his toned gym fitness contrasts with their walrus bulk. In two televised acts of adrenaline-pumped heroism, Camacho inadvertently succeeds in turning whole sections of the city against him. First, in rescuing – and arresting – a Cuban refugee from the top of the mast of a tall ship, he manages to alienate the entire Hispanic community, and second in apprehending a 300lb black crack dealer he risks inciting race riots when footage of their struggle is posted on YouTube.
Though Comacho is a more convincingly human Wolfe creation than most – you at least root for him to spring fully to life – you are never really persuaded that he is more than an intensively researched, brilliantly expressive caricature among many, another cartoon of wild and whirling interiority. His adventures are played for laughs and drama but the reactions to them feed into the author's long-standing agenda of making mischief out of political correctness. As in Bonfire of the Vanities, his stage-managed ethical dilemmas once again get somewhere near pressure points of American anxiety about multiculturalism. Almost every conversation and interaction is seen to be filtered subconsciously through racial sensitivity of one kind or another, though – in Wolfe's eyes – this is a reality that dare not speak its name. Into this minefield Nestor Camacho blunders courageously.
There is something ritualistic about Wolfe's return to these familiar satirical hunting grounds, first established in his skewering of "radical chic" in the 70s. The money and pretension of modern art, a pet subject since The Painted Word of 1975, gets another amusing going over, in particular in a long bravura scene at Miami-Basel art fair, where billionaires stampede blindly for schlocky Hirst and Koons lookalikes. He has more to say, too, about the packaging and corporatisation of teenage lust, the ostensible subject of his last novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. One strand of this book is concerned with a creepy TV psychiatrist at a porn-addiction clinic, though once again the authorial voice itself sometimes seems fixated by what Wolfe insists on referring to as the "mons veneris" of his female characters, (or sometimes the "lubricious mons pubis"). After the infamous "rutrutrutrutrut..." sex of Charlotte Simmons, however, Wolfe tends to keep himself out of the bedroom here.
Intimacy has never been his strong suit. He is, still, at his best in the thick of a crowd, a master of group dynamics, at once in breathless close-up and sudden wide-angle. You don't necessarily go to his writing any more for fresh truth about American life but you can still marvel – and laugh – at many of these scenes, full of expertly realised grotesques, and the sheer chest-thumping compulsion of language that tries to do them justice.
