Times and places …

… ‘Back to Blood,’ by Tom Wolfe - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The pacing of “Back to Blood” can be peculiarly slow: its individual sentences are as overstuffed with effects as one of Nestor’s muscle shirts, but the story unfolds with a lot of leisure and recap. Even so, Wolfe remains as skillful as ever in texturing the novel’s terrain, from the “prairie of concrete” formed by Hialeah’s front yards to a tired retirement complex up in Broward County where “the little iron balconettes and the aluminum frames for the sliding doors looked as if they were about to fall off and die in a pile.” Nestor’s grandmother wears exactly the right pair of white jeans, while the sunglasses he sports are “what every cool Cuban cop in Miami wore . . . $29.95 at CVS . . . gold bar, baby!”