Tom Wolfe Disservices his Character Magdalena in Back to Blood

 

This is the fifth book I’ve read by Tom Wolfe. His journalistic style plus stories make for great page turners. Often his books explore class, wealth, and race—quite successfully. Back to Blood explored all those and more. I’m always a little weary when a white man writes about race and tend to read with breath held. I sometimes suspect that he is “stepping back and watching and reporting on those outside his world.” Sort of like the narrator on a nature program. The other three books of his that I read, The Bonfire of the Vanities, I am Charlotte Simmons, and A Man in Full all made sense and addressed people, dialect, and intentions with respect. In Back to Blood, most of it was good, almost all of it seemed quite well thought out and reasoned, but there was a character that just didn’t make sense to me. The lovely, intelligent, first generation Cuban American, Magdalena. She’s a nurse who ends up involved in the art world, specifically Art Basel of Miami.

Exclusive interview with Doug Henderson on his novel, The Cleveland Heights LGBT Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club

Doug Henderson is a tremendously funny writer. Utilizing the authorial voice, he writes with subtle humor. His book, The Cleveland Heights LGBT Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. His characters are likeable and they make you reflect on yourself and other people. Full disclosure—Doug is a good friend who inspired me to start writing again and was the catalyst for this blog. I’ve read his novel multiple times in various forms. And each time I’m eager to reread it—I never tire of his world and only want more.

What is The Cleveland Heights LGBT Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club about?
A group of gay friends that play Dungeons & Dragons every Thursday and everything is fine until a new guy joins the group and Ben, the protagonist, gets a crush on him. Things start into motion that take the group into all different directions. There’s gay D&D, there’s heavy metal, a competing vampire role playing club, a kiss-in.

Orson Scott Card: Breaking my Heart

What do you do when you love a writer but disagree or detest his personal choices and beliefs? When I was younger, a friend handed me Henry Miller. I was immediately seduced by his passion for life and his fast-paced language. He described everything with such joy and humor. He lived life to the fullest. This included using money his wife sent him to visit prostitutes. I was 18, and grew up a fundamentalist Christian. Paying women for sex was wrong. Cheating on your wife was wrong. Not having a 9-5 job was wrong. . . . There was a lot of wrong stuff happening in Tropic of Cancer. But I loved him and learned to separate him from his writing (which was tricky as a lot of his stuff is confessionalist.) But also, I was still brainwashed with these antiquated notions of what was right and wrong. Bukowski was another one. Dirty old man writing about drinking, women, gambling. But as I matured as a person and a reader I realized you could separate the artist from the art.