Adorable Loonies

Still Reading: Two Years before the Mast

Currently Reading: Coal Black Horse, Robert Olmstead

Just Finished: Nature Girl, Carl Hiassen

Adorable loonies--and I'm not talking about Canadian currency (which just got more adorable by achieving parity with the dollar). Nope, this adorable loony is the main character in Carl Hiassen's Nature Girl. As I read, I kept thinking, "There's someone Honey Santana [eye-roll] reminds me of. Who could it be?" Reading on: "Right. Serge Storms."

Hiassen has always written about people who, if they aren't crazy, are at least caricatures, and vice versa. Here, a possibly bipolar protagonist encourages the willing suspension of disbelief in one's readers. Good thing, too, since Honey is the main engineer of Nature Girl's wholly improbable plot. She also has a tendency to hear dueling tunes in her head; e.g. "Smoke on the Water" v. "Rainy Days and Mondays." Without the bipolar aspect, my willing suspension wouldn't have been quite so willing. (Tim Dorsey, you've served the cause well.)

Rudeness in Florida--the road rage of entitlement yuppies and rednecks alike, the window-rattling truck muffler of the kid next door--is pretty much a given and something with which everyone must deal. Honey's quirk is that she can't deal; her quest is to school one snotty telemarketer selling "ranchettes" in Gilchrist County, who, because Honey didn't hang up, grievously insults her. If she can make him see the error of his ways, the world will be a better place for her boy Fry. Through subterfuge and manic energy, she tricks the telemarketer into paying a visit to her neck of the woods: Everglades City and the Ten Thousand Islands. If he can see the glory that is wild south Florida, he'll be a changed man. Or not.

From a kayak outing perfectly set on a river feeding into Chokoloskee Bay (tangled mangroves, spiderwebs, herons, gray pelicans) to the dead python on the Tamiami Trail, Hiassen's eye for Florida is superb. His descriptions of wild and not-so-wild Florida as well as the seamlessly inserted accounts of Florida history make me wish Hiassen would try to write a straight literary novel of the state. I've been reading and enjoying Hiassen for years; at long last, speaking just for myself, I'd be ready for something new and different, if not completely new and different: a Hiassen novel where the humor takes a backseat to the message.