The story triumphs …

… A Commonplace Blog: Bonfire of the ethnicities. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In Back to Blood, his new novel about the ethnic rivalries in Miami, Wolfe has created his most sympathetic character yet—perhaps the first of Wolfe’s characters to escape the prison of status com­petition altogether. Nestor Camacho is a 25-year-old policeman, the son of refugees from Castro’s Cuba, living with his parents in Hialeah, a “city of 220,000 souls, and close to 200,000 must be Cubans.” Miami’s official Little Havana is a stretch “along Calle Ocho, where the tourists all stopped at Café Versailles and had a cup of terribly sweet Cuban coffee,” pleased to have soaked up the “authentic, picturesque, folk­lórica atmósfera.” The real Little Havana is Hialeah, where the Cubans, “by nature ambitious,” have moved to get away from the old neighborhood, now a slum populated by Nicaraguans “and God knew who else.”