Tom Wolfe Takes Miami’s Pulse In ‘Back To Blood’

Tom Wolfe wrote his new novel, Back to Blood, entirely by hand. But the author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities also says that wasn’t entirely by choice — he’d rather have used a typewriter.

“Unfortunately, you can’t keep typewriters going today — you have to take the ribbons back to be re-inked,” Wolfe tells Fresh Air‘s Dave Davies. “There’s a horrible search to try to find missing parts.”

Back to Blood is set in Miami, which Wolfe describes as the only city where an immigrant community rose to dominate the political landscape in just over a generation. The novel deals with racial and ethnic conflict among the city’s diverse inhabitants, including immigrants from Cuba, Haiti and Russia, as well as the city’s long-established African-American and Anglo communities. Its central character, the young Cuban-American police officer Nestor Camacho, struggles with his identity and the ire of his community after safely bringing a Cuban refugee down from the top of a ship’s mast and arresting him before he could set foot on American soil.