I’ll give the author credit for opening the action with two issues that inflame the senses and test the sanity of every South Floridian: dealing with ethnic differences and finding a damn place to park.

Within its folds of fat, the book does contain some good writing and entertaining scenes, if only (ojalá que) Wolfe weren’t so repetitious, tedious and hell-bent on the obvious. Narrative takes a backseat to excess, and his snarky novelistic tune about Miami becomes a highly exaggerated and unlistenable rap.

If Wolfe or an editor had taken a scalpel to the manuscript and cut the hyperbole and tirades down to reasonable size, we might have been reading something special.

As is, I can’t get through it all. Not even close.

Tom Wolfe was certainly a fine writer, someone who dove in and lived what he wrote about. We owe a debt to him for his pioneering and producing some landmark works in Literary Journalism and American fiction with attitude. Like “Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

God knows what sort of real or imaginary head trip Wolfe was on during his research days and writing time in South Florida. Maybe “Return to Blood” was a statement to those other Florida biggie writers, saying, “Hey I can write crazier shit than you can.”