Tomtits Are Go!
The Man in the White Suit Strikes Back
Tom Wolfe did things his way. In Back to Blood (Little, Brown and Company, 2012), he tells a tale of American excess, racial tension and integrity (or the lack of it) in Miami, Florida as only he can. All the Wolfe-isms are there in abundance abundance abundance — exaggerated characters in hyperreal settings, copious onomatopoeia, descriptions too anatomical for their own good, strange words ranging from the real (“upwrought”) to the dubious (“luxodontic”) to the fanciful (“apriconcoction”), and parenthetical expressions so numerous and lengthy that the core sentence attentuates and vanishes— including a new one: setting apart the thoughts of characters not with commas, quotation marks or italics, but by bracketing them in blocks of six colons. So invasive, so inexplicable, so gluttonous, bizarre, gauche and wanton is this use of punctuation that Isidore of Seville would weep to see what has become of his children, but Wolfe was ever one to flout convention, so I suspect he was, twinkle in eye, taking one last piss out of the literary establishment, and his editors simply threw up their hands. ::::::Oh, who cares? He’s Tom Wolfe! Author of not one but two Great American Novels! He can do what he wants!::::::
Note: I wrote this for Medium.com. If you are reading this on another platform, it has been pirated. I quit the Medium Partner Program, so I’m not doing this for money. It is nice, however, to know someone’s reading, so please clap or comment to let me know somebody’s out there. Gladius adhuc lucet.
