Miami: City of the Future, by T. D. Allman (Atlantic Monthly Press, 432 pp., $22.50) Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists, and Refugees in the New America, by David Rieff (Little, Brown, 230 pp., $16.95) Miami, by Joan Didion (Simon & Schuster, 238 pp., $17.95)
Three years after the runaway success of the television series Miami Vice, Miami seems to have caught hold of a certain segment of the American literary imagination. Russell Banks’s Continental Drift and Elmore Leonard’s police procedurals were the first signs of the trend. Now three nonfiction accounts of the city have appeared in one literary season. The Miami that emerges from these books is a vibrant, volatile, and decadent city, where roughly half the population consists of exiles from a Communist country who dream of imminent return, and another large bloc consists of exiles from the colder climes of the United States who dream of a life of permanent leisure. The attention of all three writers is inexorably drawn to the massive, lively, Cuban and Cuban-American community in Miami, at the expense of the black and Anglo segments of the population. The result is a good bit of political polemic, some absorbing travelogue, and one relatively comprehensive portrait of this confusing and perhaps confused city.
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