Two years after John D. MacDonald moved from New York state to Sarasota, Carl Hiaasen was born in what was then a rural suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Plantation, Florida. When Hiaasen turned 6, his father bought him his first typewriter, and he’s never stopped writing since.
He was producing newspaper columns through high school and at Emory University and the University of Florida. In 1974, with a degree in journalism, he began his newspaper career in Cocoa, Florida, and was soon hired away by the Miami Herald, where he first worked on the city desk, then the Sunday Magazine, then with the paper’s Pulitzer-prize-winning investigative team. Those assignments served as his graduate education, from which he learned to value precision, accuracy, and, most important, Finley Peter Dunne’s statement of the primary role of journalism: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
In 1985 he began writing his own column for the paper, which continued for 36 years. The best of those columns have been collected in three books, Kick Ass, Paradise Screwed, and Dance of the Reptiles.
The columns are replete with examples of Hiaasen’s compassion for the afflicted. He wrote often about the middle and lower class victims of the various scammers and predators, including numerous members of the various layers of government, and of the various schemes and distortions of public policy fostered by the all-powerful developers. He relentlessly exposed the misdeeds of Miami politicians of both parties, blending thorough documentation with trenchant interpretation.
Not long after he began his Herald column, Hiaasen turned to writing fiction, like many reporters before him. Unlike most of those reporters, whose desks conceal reams of unfinished Great American Novels, Hiaasen found publication immediately and has turned out, “in his spare time,” seventeen novels, five novels for younger readers, and two non-fiction books, one a savage dissection of the Disney empire, one a memoir of his lifelong tragic romance with golf.
In a recent interview, he described writing novels as his therapy. “You don’t come out of a career in journalism with any real hope for humanity,” he explained. While this pessimism may characterize Hiassen’s private view, you’d never know it from his novels. In his novels, fictional versions of the malefactors Hiaasen identified in his newspaper work, most of whom remain unpunished in what passes for real life in Florida, meet their well-deserved deserts in all sorts of poetic, satisfying ways. My personal favorite is the fate of Reynaldo Phibbs, a thinly disguised replica of Geraldo Rivera, whose narcissistic performance as a “journalist” Hiaasen had long loathed. In Skin Tight, Reynaldo, posing as a male stripper, engages Rudy Graveline, a murderously sleazy plastic surgeon, to perform liposuction on him. When Reynaldo’s cameraman bursts into the operating room to confront Graveline, the surgeon is so bollixed that he loses control of his cannula, and the liposuction turns fatal, as he basically vacuums Reynaldo’s viscera right out of him. Grotesque, perhaps, but when you think about Geraldo . . . .
Though the received wisdom in journalism schools recommends writing for readers at an 8th grade level, HIaasen never really accepted such restrictions, though he did tend in his newspaper work to keep his vocabulary on the simpler side and his paragraphs quite brief. Novels allowed him to forget about such restrictions and write in his natural voice. What a critic said of John D. MacDonald’s narrative voice – “To read him is to hear a spoken voice – pausing, digressing, joking, all the while drawing you into the yarn” – is equally true of Hiaasen’s voice. Here, for example, is his account of the inception of a fight between Skin Tight’s protagonist, Mick Stranahan, and a surgically disfigured hit man known as Chemo:
“At these words, Maggie Gonzalez upchucked gloriously all over Chemo’s gun arm. Given his general translucence, it was impossible to tell if Chemo blanched. He did, however, wobble perceptibly.” “Translucence; blanched; wobble perceptibly” – this is not your standard eight-grade vocabulary, nor is it your customary terse, faux Hemingway hardboiled lingo, though it serves as the preface to an extremely brutal encounter.
While Hiaasen’s novels include plenty of brutal characters of both sexes, they are all rendered in graceful, eloquent prose. His narrative voice allows the reader to be as amused as Hiaasen is with his own mastery of the language, and to share the author’s delight in the infinite convolutions of human evil and greed, without forgetting their appalling consequences. Robert Frost once asked George Plimpton, “What do I want to communicate but what a hell of a good time I had writing it?” That’s what Hiaasen communicates – what a hell of a good time he has observing the absurd excesses of his native state, and the admirable characters who pop up to oppose those excesses.
Another delight in Hiaasen’s writing stems from his infinite curiosity, the quality that makes great journalists. He wants to know not just what has happened, but very precisely how it came to happen. And he finds out. An example from his golfing memoir The Downhill Lie:
” [The Titleist Pro VI] had 392 dimples arranged in an ‘icosahedral design.’ Although empirical evidence abounds that the number of dimples on a golf ball is meaningless, manufacturers proudly advertise it anyway . . . . I’d never encountered the term ‘icosahedral’ until I saw it in the Titleist promotional material. According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, it means ‘of or having the form of an icosahedron.’
“An icosahedron is ‘a polyhedron having twenty faces,’ and there’s the hitch: A golf ball that’s truly spherical cannot be truly icosahedral, because plane faces are flat.
“Among the shapes that may be icosahedral are pyramids, decagonal dipyyamids, elongated triangual gyrobicupolas, metabiauagmented dodecahedrons, nonagonal antiprisms . . . but not spheres. Spheres, like balls, are always round . . . .
“The makers of Titleists probably have a slick defense for their esoteric geometric claims, but it doesn’t matter . . . . I’ll keep buying the damn thing because, like all golfers, I desperately need to believe.”
Hiaasen, like most boomers, retained hope that some degree of justice and reason and decency might be achieved by working, if not exactly within, at least with the system. From his first novel Tourist Season on, he shows no admiration for fanatics of any cause, no matter how admirable he might consider the cause. But, like most boomers, the deep seated anger that fueled his early novels dissipated with age, and his novels after the 12th, Nature Girl, have largely devolved into still amusing but predictable formula jobs. He seems to have decided to put his anger over environmental destruction, and his remaining hope, into his novels for young readers, in which young people take up the causes of various endangered species or habitats and succeed against a hopelessly corrupt adult world.
A worthy successor to John D. MacDonald, Hiassen has carried on the torch for opposition to the despoiling of Florida (and, by extension, of the entire earth) with honor, and with a sense of humor that seems unquenchable. In the face of what Florida has become, that is no small achievement.
