"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.

Some Highly Rated Books of 2018

I've been reading three books this month. All were published in 2018, and all with very good reviews, including winning or being short-listed for some prestigious prizes. A brief report on these:

Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li.

I enjoyed Number One Chinese Restaurant because it surprised me. I didn't realize that I had a stereotyped expectation for a book about the owners and workers in a Chinese restaurant, but I did. It's a very good book: good plot, well-drawn and numerous characters, lots of action.

The author seems aware of these stereotypes. Her characters have a painful awareness of who they are and who other people think they are: their identity as waiters or busboys or Chinese restaurant owners. They know themselves, and they know how their customers, their bosses, their business contacts, their children, their parents, their wives or husbands, and their lovers think of them.

One waiter, who has been working 6 days a week for 50 years, for example, performs for the customers:

"He hobbled off, cutting a comic figure as he swung his left leg in front of his right. He could still fool the customers into thinking his lurching walk and shaky hands were part of his character, a Chinese Charlie Chaplin who might look as if he’d spill the tray but never did." (Kindle Locations 358-360).

Despite his success, the owner, Jimmy Han, fears stereotypes too:

"Han was hardly reinventing the wheel with his menu. Northern Chinese cuisine could be summed up in three words: meat, onions, and garlic."(Kindle Locations 473-474). 

"All around him were restaurants that were out of his league. The pizzeria boasting eight-hundred-degree ovens and ninety-second Neapolitan pies; the sushi restaurant owned by a Japanese chef with a show on Netflix; the French bistro with tasting menus starting at $145 a person. What would the Glory have? Peking duck carved tableside, like on a fucking Carnival cruise!"(Kindle Locations 1864-1866).

"Was it tasty? Sure. But was it authentic? Was it anything to be proud of? Only the Peking duck fit the bill. His father, not for want of trying, had never figured out how to prepare the duck faster than the traditional way, with the fowls shipped down from Long Island, their skin air-dried then brushed with sugar, and finished off with slow heat in a rotisserie oven. Everything else on the menu was a scam." (Kindle Locations 2090-2093).

“We’re a Chinese restaurant,” Jimmy said. “We buy what’s cheapest.” (Kindle Location 4832). 

My brief review doesn't really get at how the development of characters and situations in this book worked to explode my stereotypes, but it really did a great job!

Florida by Lauren Groff.

"Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida," is the description of the hapless helpless woman in the last of Lauren Goff's short story collection. It could be the description of every heroine in the book. Some women in these stories are single,  some have problem husbands, some are homeless, some abandon small children, and a few of them dwell obsessively about climate change or piling-up worldwide trash: "the world my children will inherit, the clouds of monarchs they won’t ever see, the underwater sound of the mouths of small fish chewing the living coral reefs that they will never hear."(Kindle Locations 2191-2192). 

It's a tragic world but somehow sometimes also funny; it strangely makes me think of Carl Hiaasen's hilarious stories in very similar settings -- like swamps and run-down apartment houses. When the air conditioning goes off, civilization goes with it. Even when Goff's women run away to France or to a Northern State, they can't escape their Florida identity.

In one story, a mother is left in the Florida wilderness with her kids. She writes

"I made scrambled eggs with a vengeful amount of butter and cheddar, also cocoa with an inch of marshmallow, thinking I would stupefy my children with calories, but the calories only made them stronger." (Kindle Locations 779-780).

A different story features a woman who escapes her usual life to live briefly in Normandy with her two small sons. She takes them for something to eat in a shack on the windswept beach; her drifting thoughts go from the food to her distant future:

"There, protected by a lufting sheet of clear plastic, she orders three buckwheat galettes with cheese and egg, and one salted caramel crêpe for dessert. At home they eat sugar only on holiday or in emergencies— she knows it is a poison; it can make you fat and crazy and eventually lose your memories when you are old, and she has a severe horror of being a stringy-haired cackler in the old-age home; she has boys, she’s not dumb, she knows that sad obsolescence will more than likely be her fate if humanity even lasts that long..." (Kindle Locations 2350-2353).

Milkman by Anna Burns.

The narrator of this book reminds me of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus her strange doppelgänger. So sensitive that life just gets in their way. So fearful. Rubbed so raw. So unable to deal with a very difficult present.

In Milkman, the present is really difficult. The unnamed narrator lives in an unnamed town that's torn by violence between two unnamed religions. She has a "maybe-boyfriend," sisters and brothers-in-law, other relatives and friends, and all of them live in a world of tight and somewhat unnamed expectations. For example, maybe-boyfriend has a friend who is interested in cooking, and would like to be a chef. What this means:

"... male chefs – especially of little pastries and petit fours and fancies and dainties to which one could level the criticism ‘desserts’ and which chef here was a maker of – were not in demand and not socially acceptable. Contrary to other chef parts of the world, a man here could be a cook, though even then he’d better work on the boats, or in a man’s internment camp or in some other full-on male environment. Otherwise he was a chef which meant homosexual with a drive to recruit male heterosexuals into the homosexual fold." (Kindle Locations 492-496).

I haven't finished reading Milkman, because I find it a struggle to read it and face the narrator's problems. I promise to finish it soon. (UPDATE: I finished it. It gets better and better in the second half!)

What I plan to read next:
There, There by Tommy Orange

Man and Nature

Burrowing Owl that lives in a subdivision across from a school in Cape Coral, Florida,
where around 1000 owls nest among houses and other buildings.
Birders roam the subdivision looking for the owls.

Same Burrowing Owl, different angle, on his burrow near the stop sign.

As I traveled around in Florida last week, I generally tried to take wildlife photos that omitted the overwhelming human presence everywhere I went. On the plane I was reading one of Carl Hiaasen's "Skink" books. These are essentially a series of revenge fantasies where the culprits are those responsible for destroying Florida's native wilderness. Corruption and greed drive the destruction of wetlands, coastal areas, beaches, and wildlife without government or other control in every one of the books and the only satisfaction is from the creatively violent way the culprits die -- which is wishful thinking. The bizarre life of the character Skink, who lives in the wilderness and eats roadkill, highlights the strangeness of Hiaasen's Florida vision.

While reading, I began to think about how every opportunity I had to see wildlife was essentially reconstructed, not at all in it's natural state. Even the Corkscrew Swamp native forest: one views it from a boardwalk! I had already been thinking that there's virtually nothing natural and untouched in Florida, though there are many birds, trees, animals, and beautiful wetlands. I decided to find and post the photos I took that captured this collision of man and nature.

Whistling ducks and an ibis with a chain link fence that
protects a sewage settling pond.

A painted bunting at a feeder in Corkscrew Swamp.

At the wildlife refuge on Sanibel Island ospreys nest on the
park floodlights. 

A raccoon scavenging people's trash on the beautiful white sand beach.

Airboat ride in the Everglades: cormorants roosting on a channel marker.

Very few Florida panthers survive. Sometimes I wondered
if there was one panther crossing sign for each of them. 

In Big Cypress preserve, one sees the unspoiled forest from the boardwalk.

Sign for another boardwalk near Flamingo in the Everglades.

The Celery Fields near Sarasota is a beautiful wetland,
restored for flood control and wildlife after many years as agricultural land.

At the famous Anhinga Trail: a crow waiting for crumbs from our lunch.

I previously wrote about Skink here: "Bad Monkey" and "Roadkill Chronicles." From his website: "Since 1985 Hiaasen has been writing a regular column, which at one time or another has pissed off just about everybody in South Florida, including his own bosses."

Roadkill Chronicles -- Carl Hiaasen

During my trip to Florida this week I've been reading Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen, the first of his books (pub. 1987) about the really quirky character named Skink. The book is mainly set somewhere in Florida not far from the areas I've been visiting. It's a very long murder mystery with lots of cliches, like pretty but dumb women who throw themselves at the central detective-type character. Pretty amusing, sort of out of date with regard to women.  I liked Bad Monkey, his more recent book, better.

One of Skink's most bizarre habits is eating road kill. During the book, he collects fresh opossum, squirrel, rabbit and even armadillo, which he carefully cooks over an open fire. I was going to get direct quotes but actually they are kind of gross! Skink also eats minnows live right out of the bait bucket, and he is close friends with a gigantic large-mouth bass. (The plot of the book is about bass-fishing tournaments, but I'll skip that part.)

What I liked best about Double Whammy was how much the author (and the more sympathetic of his characters) hated the way the natural world of Florida had been destroyed by truly cynical developers who ripped out the natural vegetation, ruined the marshes, dunes, and beaches, and polluted the waterways. The strange behavior of Skink is attributed to how much he had wanted to stop development and ruination of the landscape, and how he had failed.

Going into the wildlife refuges is a contrast to the overdevelopment that, as Hiaasen illustrates, has been so common in Florida, and when trying to find the remnants of the once-abundant bird life here you definitely are aware of it. And there certainly is a lot of road kill around -- though it's mostly vultures, not eccentric and reclusive literary characters that devour it. I thought that it was a very interesting thing to see these impressive birds of prey that circle around everywhere. So here are a few scenes from our travels in Florida to complement my reading:

Black Vultures eating a wild boar (Skink never gets one of these!)

Vultures eating a raccoon, Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge

A shore bird eating someone's rejected fish catch,
Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge.

"Bad Monkey"

I am fascinated with the role of food in detective fiction, as I have often blogged about. Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen has some the most bizarre food themes of any detective story I've read. It's also a very amusing and reasonably suspenseful tale of some pleasingly eccentric characters.

Bad Monkey centers on Yancy, a disgraced detective in the Florida keys. He had misbehaved and therefore had been removed from the police force. In place of the inspector's job he loved, he's given "roach patrol." That is, he's assigned to be a restaurant inspector. Instead of savoring gourmet meals (as do fictional detectives like Nero Wolf, Spenser, or Brunetti), or eating macho meals (like V.I.Warshawski) or just eating frequently during investigations (like Elmore Leonard's characters), poor Yancy is so disgusted with food that he practically stops eating at all. Instead of enjoying the delicious seafood delicacies on offer throughout the Keys, he begins obsessing about the revolting conditions in restaurant kitchens where he had to count the roaches and smell the rot.

"Yancy received his first bribe offer at a tin-roofed seafood joint ... called Stoney's Crab Palace, where he had documented seventeen serious health violations, including mouse droppings, rat droppings, chicken droppings, a tick nursery, open vats of decomposing shrimp, lobsters dating back to the first Bush presidency and, on a tray of baked oysters, a soggy condom. ... 

"Working for the Division of Hotels and Restaurants was the worst job he'd ever had. His appetite had disappeared the first morning, and in three weeks he'd lost eleven pounds. It was demoralizing to see how many ways food could be defiled. His first sighting of maggots put him off rice pudding forever. The opening of lobster season brought no joy ... all he thought about, day and night, was salmonella." (p. 36-37)

A monkey like the one in Bad Monkey
(from my trip to Costa Rica last year)

The central plot of Bad Monkey involves Yancy's efforts to identify the perp of a deeply bizarre murder and fraud case, and bring several villains to justice in strange and entertaining ways. For this he travels to Andros Island in the Bahamas, where he encounters several very colorful characters, particularly the monkey in the title. The monkey becomes addicted to deep-fried snacks, which make him more and more unhealthy. Another very very weird food themes.

 Eventually a beautiful and talented girl friend manages to cook for Yancy and tempt him back to eating, but as his investigation unfolds, he keeps being forced to return to Stoney's and confront his wiggling, maggoty demons.