Reading a Tom Wolfe novel is like spending a very long day at a theme park, several days, really—each of his four novels runs to more than 700 pages.

Scenes racket along like thrill rides powered by the electricity of his prose style, hissing and sparking. Everything is meant to exhilarate and appall—high greed, low squalor—while exclamation points wave like the hands of those roller-coaster riders who take pride in never gripping the safety bars. Wolfeland can be muddy—much wallowing in the human ooze—but it is safe. His is a confected world analogous in its lurid way to Disneyland's Main Street U.S.A.—not too far from reality, but not too close.

Mr. Wolfe has said that the force driving both human life and his own work is the eternal lure of status, but I suspect that what brings his readers through the turnstiles are spectacles of humiliation, the flip side of the status coin.

Back to Blood

By Tom Wolfe
Little, Brown, 703 pages, $30

Edward Kinsella III

In "Back to Blood" the humiliatees include a Russian oligarch who becomes the hero of Miami by donating a collection of early-20th-century Russian paintings to a museum, only to become a villain when the Miami Herald reveals that the paintings are forgeries he has ordered up. A Cuban-American cop, Nestor Camacho, climbs a rope hand-over-hand to the top of an anchored schooner's mast to rescue a refugee from Cuba, only to have his entire family and neighborhood turn on him as a traitor to his people—the refugee is now likely to be sent back. Then his girlfriend, Magdalena, leaves him for Norman Lewis, a social-climbing psychiatrist for whom she works as a nurse.

In a courtship tactic with which I am not familiar, Lewis tries to seduce Magdalena by showing her a photograph of a inflamed and herpetic groin belonging to Maurice Fleischmann, a billionaire pornography addict. He thereby humiliates nurse, billionaire and himself. We are led to believe that a Haitian professor already suffering the humiliation of trying to pass for French will likely be humiliated more after the end of the book, when his carefully cultured daughter takes up with Nestor.

Humiliation is a trope of comedy, but Mr. Wolfe's once-wonderful laughter is reduced here to a grubby snicker. There are chapters titled "Humiliation One" and "Humiliation, Too." It's as if attractions at the theme park include ducking stools and tar-and-feather tableaus where readers are safely confronted by their deepest fears of shame.

Mr. Wolfe insulates us from these horrors by describing them at one remove. The inflamed groin is seen not on the examining table but in a photograph. He sometimes has characters speak in his own authorial voice. For instance, Norman Lewis describes the bacchanalia of a boat party they attend: "You will witness things you never thought possible. You will have a picture of mankind with all the rules removed. You will see Man's behavior at the level of bonobos and baboons. And that's where Man is headed! You will see the future out here in the middle of nowhere! You will have an extraordinary preview of the looming un-human, thoroughly animal, fate of Man!" As it happens, the most extraordinary it gets is pornography projected on a sail, a second-hand orgy.

Throughout "Back to Blood," scenes are distanced even further by being repeated on television, in conversation, photographs, flashbacks and interior monologues—scenes such as the cop climbing the rope. That is in the first chapter. More than 300 pages later Mr. Wolfe is still repeating the scene, this time as it appears on video. He even throws in a 1,000-year history of rope-climbing as a sport, calisthenic and former Olympic event. This is no "Rashomon" trick meant to show us the mutability of truth. It is more like a repeating TV ad that establishes scenes and characters as if they were brands.

Mr. Wolfe is a brand, too, shown on the dust jacket with his intriguing smirk and the famous white suit he wears like Colonel Sanders on buckets of fried chicken.

"Back to Blood" opens with a prologue about a WASP couple in Miami trying to find a parking space for their "chic and morally enlightened" Mitsubishi "Green Elf," then getting into an argument with the Latina in a Ferrari who beats them out. An operatic scream-fest of ethnic slurs follows between the WASP wife and the Latina.

The scene lasts 19 pages, a long way to go for a parking space. The women never appear firsthand again, and the man, the editor of the Miami Herald, will later spend hundreds of pages without a line. No matter—the point of the scene isn't the introduction of characters or plot but the opportunity it gives Mr. Wolfe to offer a warning in the editor's interior monologue. "Everybody . . . all of them . . . it's back to blood! Religion is dying . . . but everybody still has to believe in something." That something, we learn, is not science or rationality but "only our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies to unite us. 'La Raza!' as the Puerto Ricans cry out." The Arabs, too. "All people, everywhere, you have no choice but—Back to blood!"

Is this really going to be a novel about a coming race war, along the lines of a survivalist paperback? Fortunately, no. Ethnic tension abounds, but racial fear and hatred supercharge Mr. Wolfe's fiction, and we should be used to it.

An oddity—there is much ethnological analysis of the novel's Latins, WASPs and a lower-class Southern white, but none of the novel's Jews.

Chapter 1 begins with a police patrol boat answering a call about the mast-top refugee in Biscayne Bay. "SMACK the Safe Boat bounces airborne comes down again SMACK on another swell in the bay bounces up again comes down SMACK." It takes 11 pages to get the boat to the refugee. The word "SMACK" appears more than 70 times.

Back in the day, devices like this amused us with their daring, whether they worked or not. Mr. Wolfe's 1964 piece on Las Vegas began with the word "hernia" repeated more than 50 times. That didn't work either, but it was fun in its outrageousness. By now, such devices aren't fun as much as they are Mr. Wolfe's stock in trade. You know what you are going to get, and you get it. As Hunter Thompson said, "Buy the ticket, take the ride."

Half a century ago, Mr. Wolfe set out to restore the energy that had ebbed out of American journalism after H.L. Mencken's heyday. He reveled in the verbal frolicking that Strunk & White and our higher-toned periodicals had liquidated in the name of modernist minimalism and gentility. The approved tone then was the ironic understatement of the era's existentialism. But suddenly it was the 1960s, and Mr. Wolfe was writing in the ironic overstatement of rampaging consumerism.

During his tour at the Washington Post, which started in 1959, a colleague remembers Mr. Wolfe saying: "I'm going to go to New York, wear white suits and be famous." That is what he did, becoming Tom Wolfe-in-full after he arrived at the New York Herald Tribune in 1962.

He was one of the Trib's shock troops in its war against the New York Times, whose grayness back then conferred propriety to the upper classes the way a communion wafer conferred a state of grace. Then Esquire—astonishingly great back then—found him, and he became one of the leading writers of what was called the New Journalism, or, in the terminology of an alarmed 1965 cover-story essay in the New York Review of Books, "parajournalism." Imagine—America's leading literary journal ran a cover story attacking a mere collection of newspaper and magazine pieces. That is the kind of impact Mr. Wolfe had back then.

Like a great athlete, he didn't just excel; he changed how the feature-writing game was played. Along with his New Journalism cohort, Mr. Wolfe imported fictional techniques into nonfiction—anecdotal lead paragraphs, points of view, interior monologues and cultural analysis, whatever it took to evoke the zeitgeist.

He strung sentences and paragraphs together in a marvelously long, sinuous and unbroken line, like Picasso bringing a nude to life in one easy 3-foot swipe. He had a tempo that gave the illusion of gaining speed in the manner of a jazz drummer who achieves the state known as swinging.

See "The Last American Hero," the piece he wrote on stock-car driver Junior Johnson in 1965, a piece so masterly that other feature writers refused for decades to go anywhere near Nascar and good ol' boy heroes. Or the cool intensity of his astronaut book, "The Right Stuff," in 1979. Or 1970s "Radical Chic" about Leonard Bernstein and Manhattan's rich intellectuals pandering to the Black Panthers, a story that the New Yorker was still attacking almost 40 years after it appeared—sort of a lifetime-achievement award for Mr. Wolfe.

He didn't quite free us from the great gray complacency of upscale New York periodicals—that is like bringing democracy to Russia—but he kept his insurgency alive.

In 1973, he announced that fiction was dying of irrelevance. What a relief to all those young newspaper writers who could now throw out the half-finished first novels sitting in their desk drawers.

By the 1980s, the half-finished novels had become half-finished screenplays, and the quality-lit first novel had become the province of writing students. Then Mr. Wolfe's acolytes were startled to hear that he was backsliding, going back to the Grail Quest of writing a big novel in America.

In 1987, at 56, he published his first one, "The Bonfire of the Vanities." New Journalism be damned, it was a huge success that inspired a movie of the same name. But something had changed. Compared with his earlier work, it didn't swing as much. His micro-detailed reporting seemed busy in fiction, despite his claims that shoe-leather fact-gathering was the sine qua non of great novels. Often, we couldn't see the woods for the trees, the characters for their clothes.

In nonfiction reporting the author serves the reader while in high-status fiction the reader is supposed to bow to King Author—Hemingway, Saul Bellow, David Foster Wallace. In "Bonfire" it was harder to feel that Mr. Wolfe was working for us rather than competing for the status of a Big Novelist.

He had excited us in his journalism by breaking rules, but in 20th-century fiction the rules had already been broken into tiny pieces. He used stream-of-consciousness in the manner of James Joyce and typographical exuberance familiar from John Dos Passos, but he returned to the 19th-century worldview of Dickens, Balzac and Zola. He gave us not Age of Anxiety alienation but social panorama in the 19th-century mode. This was his new apostasy, but it wasn't as exhilarating as the old one.

His next novel, "A Man in Full" (1998), sold even more in hardcover, according to Mr. Wolfe's website, but it may have been the easiest best seller not to finish since Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind." After that, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (2004) had much lower sales and worse reviews. Now, "Back to Blood," a tale of humiliation and one-upmanship, a platform for scenes like the one in a chapter called "The Pissing Monkey."

Mr. Wolfe presents us with a lightly disguised version of the late Mike Wallace ("Ike Walsh"), being bested by Norman Lewis in an improbable "60 Minutes" interview. The interview seems to exist to justify the inclusion of a disgusting fable that sums up the humiliation theme. It's about a man whose pet monkey urinates on his head, a humiliation he ends by urinating on the monkey's head. You could argue that it is extraneous baggage of the big-novel sort, King Author's royal prerogative. That, or Mr. Wolfe fails to follow the old wisdom about cutting passages one loves too much. Instead of "killing his darlings," as the wisdom urges, he buries them alive in his readers' minds. Or repeats them in his next book.

Is the hairdo he calls the "Hialeah crash helmet" any relation to the fedora he called the "Madison Ave. crash helmet" in 1965? Didn't I see the "Halusian Gulp" in "The Right Stuff," which came out in 1979? On the other hand, unless I missed it, I have the feeling that this is the first Wolfe book I've read in a long time that doesn't contain the phrase "hog-stomping baroque." Oldies but goodies—Mr. Wolfe himself is 81. There are clichés of the sort I don't recall in his earlier work. Tires squeal "bloody murder." A character gives someone a "look that kills." Magdalena begins blinking "to beat the band."

A reported $7 million advance means that the publisher plans on selling a lot of books. Mr. Wolfe has a loyal readership. But the long Picasso prose line of his early days has frayed and the momentum has gotten staticky. He writes now the way Michael Jackson twitched through music videos, a collection of moves and gimmicks that for all their appeal rarely flowed together into dance.

Still, Jackson was a great entertainer, and Mr. Wolfe has been one too. There will be hullabaloo. You can buy the ticket, you can take the ride.
