"Skinny DIp" and "Lucky You" by Carl Hiaasen

Lucky You, published 1997.

"The Everglades empties off the Florida peninsula into a shimmering panorama of tidal flats, serpentine channels and bright-green mangrove islets. The balance of life there depends upon a seasonal infusion of freshwater from the mainland. Once it was a certainty of nature, but no more. The drones who in the 1940s carved levees and gouged canals throughout the upper Everglades gave absolutely no thought to what would happen downstream to the fish and birds, not to mention the Indians. For the engineers, the holy mission was to ensure the comfort and prosperity of non-native humans. In the dry season the state drained water off the Everglades for immediate delivery to cities and farms. In the wet season it pumped millions of gallons seaward to prevent flooding of subdivisions, pastures and crops.

"Over time, less and less freshwater reached Florida Bay, and what ultimately got there wasn’t so pure. When the inevitable drought came, the parched bay changed drastically. Sea grasses began to die off by the acre. The bottom turned to mud. Pea-green algae blooms erupted to blanket hundreds of square miles, a stain so large as to be visible from NASA satellites. Starved for sunlight, sponges died and floated to the surface in rotting clumps." (Lucky You, p. 337).

Skinny Dip, published 2004.
(Skink book 5)

Carl Hiaasen's books have these two subjects in common:

• "the destruction of the Florida Everglades and the $8 billion effort to save what remains." (Skinny Dip, dedication)
• "the pestilential abundance of lowlifes in South Florida." (Skinny Dip, p. 271).

About his first subject, the ruin of the Everglades, Hiaasen is deadly serious. The second observation inspires him to create comic plots and situations that are enormously fun to read. I've read several of his books in the past, and just finished these two.

Although every book I've read contains some very serious descriptions of the Everglades and their destruction, his invention of special instances of the lowlife characters of Florida and their antics is consistently hilarious. I think I especially like the fact that I've been to the areas he describes. For example, some of the key scenes in Skinny Dip were in the Loxahatchie National Wildlife Refuge, where we went for birdwatching during our visit to Florida last month.

Some of the key action in Skinny Dip takes place on a cruise ship. Obviously this is a setting where Hiaasen can find comic themes; as he observes: "gluttony being the principal recreation aboard cruise liners" (p. 5). Hiaasen is especially vivid when it comes to gluttony and more generally to the characteristic eating habits of his characters. For example, before the ship even sailed, there was a problem:

"... a raccoon had turned up berserk in the pastry kitchen. One of the chefs had wrestled the frothing critter into a sixty-gallon tin of guava custard before it had shredded the man’s jowls and humped snarling to the depths of the ship. A capture team from Broward Animal Control had arrived, along with health inspectors and paramedics. Evacuated passengers were appeased with rum drinks and canapés. (p. 4).

Skinny Dip has a small number of scenes with Hiaasen's very weird character Skink, who lives a hermit's life in the Everglades wilderness and eats roadkill and all-around disgusting foods, as well as making other people eat with him if they stray into his territory. He doesn't play a big role here, but in his brief apparance he's up to his old tricks, frying a dead otter and making one of his visitors share it "because that was better than leaving it to the buzzards" (p. 317).

The weird character unique to this book is nicknamed Tool. He's huge, hairy, mean, and stupid. Also funny. One of his antics is to steal pain-killer patches from nursing homes, and use them to assuage the pain of a bullet wound. He's also funny when he eats; for example at one point, he "emerged wearing black denim overalls and carrying a pizza that was frozen solid. When he took a bite, it sounded like the crack of a .22" (p. 113). As in other Hiaasen books, the course of events causes Tool to reform his very nasty attitudes, while other mean and nasty characters -- especially those that conspire to keep polluting the swamps -- receive quite drastic punishments. Comic and cruel!

On the other hand, there are scenes where food is normal -- Florida normal! For example, the novel's two sympathetic characters share "a lunch of conch chowder, grapefruit salad, sardine sandwiches and sangria" (p. 285). On another occasion, one cooks for the other: "Each slice of fish went first into a bowl of bread crumbs, then the frying pan. Joey heard the sizzle when the fillets landed in the hot oil; she counted eight and wondered if that would be enough for both of them. Never had she felt so famished" (pp. 41-42).

I like Hiaasen's books despite the repeated themes, the relentless dwelling on the tragic ecological disaster (which we've witnessed are getting worse and worse each time we visit Florida), and similarity of the overall plot in which evil characters conspire to do bad things to not-so-evil characters, and the good win out in the end.

To learn much more about Hiaasen, I recommend the recent article "Carl Hiaasen: A Crime Reader's Guide to the Classics" by Neil Nyren, which includes thumbnail sketches of his most amusing characters and a summary of his career as a writer, including the terrible tragedy of his brother's death in a mass murder. The first of Hiaasen's numerous books for kids and adults were published in the 1980s, and --

"Hiaasen’s adult and kids’ books have won nearly a dozen honors since, his journalism has brought him four of the most prestigious awards in that field, including the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and his books have been published in 34 languages, 'which is 33 more than I can read or write.' 

"There hasn’t been a new adult book since 2016, though. "There’s an obstacle to my kind of writing if you have a lot of stuff going on in your personal life,' he has said. 'I think it’s a particular obstacle if you’re trying to be funny and the stuff in your life isn’t particularly funny.' That was the case in 2018, when in June of that year, a man with a vendetta came to the office of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, and killed five people. One of them was Carl’s younger brother Rob, age 59, a columnist and assistant editor."

I've only read a small percent of Hiaasen's twenty books, and look forward to more, especially to the new one that's scheduled for publication later this year.

Blog post copyright © 2020 mae sander

for mae's food blog at maefood dot blog spot dot com.