I'm reading Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood right now. Not his best work, but the novel is still entertaining and worth a read. It's a fictional portrayal of modern Miami and the relationships between the metropolitan area's old immigrants and new immigrants.
This is my fifth Wolfe novel (The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full and I am Charlotte Simmons). After this much consumption, I'm getting the hang of the Tom Wolfe formula (as opposed to the Thomas Wolfe clusterfuck). Actually, it's not as much a formula as a recipe: a few parts emotionally-spent Caucasians, a dash of cumulatively symbolic minority characters, a hell of a lot of money and sex and a separation of three storylines and three main characters that come crashing together in unexpected ways in the last 200 pages. Wolfe's not very good at creating female characters that aren't grounded in sexuality, but he keeps trying. I sound critical, but I'm not. I like Tom Wolfe. He's as good as we've got these days. And for being an old coot, he's pretty up-to-date on the current trends of popular culture regardless of which decade he's writing in.
I've been reading Back to Blood over the course of six weeks, a page or two here and there, mostly before passing out at night or between toddler existential crises. With so much going on these days with life, family, career and other distractions, I may not finish the book for another month (or as long as the Wauwatosa Library will let me keep it). Not much time for a book. It's an afterthought.
Thinking about Back to Blood sends me back to 2002 when I was reading The Bonfire of the Vanities. I had just graduated from college, moved out of my parents house and had very little money. At one point, I legitimately had a 4 digit bank account--if you counted the digits after the decimal point. I lived in what's affectionately known as a "garden apartment", counted myself damn lucky to have a job that paid about $12 an hour, supplemented that with another job that paid $5.15 an hour and had a food/entertainment budget of less than $100 per week. I had yet to find a medical school that would take me and my future wife, not yet even a fiance, lived four hours away. There wasn't much going on in my life, which was good because I really couldn't afford for anything to be going on.
Yet I remember reading The Bonfire of the Vanities fondly. It was an old, abused paperback copy with a sticker on the spine that read "Property of the Schaumburg Public Library" -- the classic five-finger discount from my Irish Catholic grandmother, who'd say it wasn't theft because, you know, "I pay taxes." Living underground, I took every opportunity to get outside by sitting on the concrete step of the front porch of my apartment building, which faced east and provided a lot of shade on late summer evenings. I spent a lot of evenings and weekends that year reading borrowed, rented or stolen books because that was cheaper than going to the movies and I didn't get much reception on my TV. I read Bonfire over the course of one weekend. I specifically remember relishing the complicated lives of fictional New Yorkers in the 1980s because the pace and tone were so different than my all-too real and spartan existence in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago in 2002.
Looking back at these paragraphs, I realize just how excited and yet scared I was back then. And how strange it is to remember that time, which makes me feel both skittish and sentimental. I never, ever want to be that financially vulnerable again. It's a fine line between completely free and very lonely. But I am jealous of the sheer volume of free time for hobbies and frankly, to just do nothing, that I had back then.
The protagonist of The Bonfire of the Vanities is an almost middle-aged man named Sherman McCoy who struggles as a family man and amoral Wall Street trader. The protagonist of Back to Blood is Hector Camacho, a twenty something who struggles with to become someone worth remembering despite a lack of means and a reputation as being "just a kid." Quite the parallax for one author and one avid reader.
