We're All Living in a Carl Hiaasen Novel (Amy Weiss-Meyer, The Atlantic) [View all]

[highplainsdem]

Great read.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/carl-hiaasen-florida-fever-beach/682577/

-snipping to get to a paragraph about Hiaasen's 2020 novel-

After Squeeze Me, people started leaving angry comments on Hiaasen’s Amazon page. “I’d like a REFUND!” one reviewer wrote, citing disappointment with “page after page of vitriolic and vituperative character assassination of DJT.” “Fiction should be escape, not an in your face political hit-job,” another person wrote. They felt betrayed—why did this author they used to turn to for a good laugh insist on mocking Donald Trump?

-snip-

But at a certain point between the election of 2000, when the recount saga put Florida in the national spotlight, and the 2023 revelation that Trump was storing classified documents in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, something changed. You could no longer write satire about Florida’s dark side the way Hiaasen always has without writing, in some way, about national politics. And when the butt of the joke is the MAGA movement itself, some readers will inevitably take it as an affront.

-snip-

Hiaasen had just gotten back from a short trip to the Caribbean. He and Katie had left the country, he said, because he simply couldn’t bear to watch the inauguration from Florida. They’d done the same thing a few months earlier for Election Day. Hiaasen described his behavior as “cowardly.”

Did being away help take his mind off things, at least? I asked him. “I thought it would,” he said. “But there’s no hiding.” The news alerts still came through on his phone. Yet after decades of covering Florida and its politics, Hiaasen told me, “you sort of condition yourself not to be apoplectic.” You keep watching the circus, and you keep writing about it. Plus, he said, “I do have a certain amount of faith in karma.”

-snip-

Wonderful review of his new novel, Fever Beach, in the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/05/01/fever-beach-carl-hiaasen-review/

Despite his rococo buffoonery, Donald Trump has been a slippery character for novelists to hit. Writing satire about the self-satirized president so often ends up extruding something intolerably mealy, like twice-ground beef. Even the finest writers — including Booker winners Howard Jacobson and Salman Rushdie — have seen their spears glance off the great whale’s gilded blubber.

Curiously, sillier writers have struck deeper, possibly because they have spent years in the absurdist world that the Very Stable Genius has rendered our reality. In July 2020, Christopher Buckley’s “Make Russia Great Again” offered a pastiche of the first Trump White House. Just a few weeks later, Carl Hiaasen published “Squeeze Me,” a funny takedown of the high-society inanity swirling around Mar-a-Lago. As Washington Post reviewer Richard Lipez noted in his review, Hiaasen’s long career lambasting political corruption and moral grotesquerie means that “the Trump era is truly Carl Hiaasen’s moment.” These days, Je suis Florida.

-snip-

Admittedly, “Fever Beach” feels about 100 pages too long — the cardinal flaw in most comic novels. But the real question remains: Is it funny? And in this case, should we be laughing? How many times have we been solemnly admonished to strive toward understanding the culty racists festering on the edge of the Republican Party? Are red-white-and-blue charlatans suitable subjects for comedy in light of our country’s slide toward fascism — the unraveling of environmental protections, the sabotage of science and medicine, the attacks on election integrity, the tirades against immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America?

Yes. Without in any way diminishing the seriousness of the threats we’re facing or the difficulty of restoring moral and political order to the United States, humor remains a powerful weapon to pierce the armor of tyrants and raise the spirits of patriots. For all his silliness, Hiaasen is working in a grand tradition that stretches back to Mikhail Bulgakov satirizing Stalinism and Charlie Chaplin mocking Hitler. At his best, he can pack a paragraph with so many little parodic bangs that it feels like a fireworks display, when the explosions come so fast you stop saying “Ahhh” and just stand in slack-jawed bedazzlement.

-snip-

Given Jeff Bezos's lurch into his new right-wing-zombie era, it's a bit of a surprise that WaPo ran this. But I'm glad it did.

I discovered Hiaasen's novels more than 30 years ago. I'd recommend all of them, and there are some recurring characters. But Democrats new to his work will probably love his latest two, if they want to start there.

And we can all use some well-written humor these days...