THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 27, 1995 TAG: 9509270039
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
HURRICANE ANDREW brought calamity to southern Florida. It smacked matchstick subdivisions flat, tossed mobile homes like beer cans and returned chunks of the low-lying, soggy peninsula to their prehistoric wildness.
But to hear Carl Hiaasen tell it, the storm didn't go far enough: It failed to wipe clean the state's spiritual and ecological stain, to chase its predatory Sans-A-Belt snowbirds back to the north Jersey burbs from whence they came. Some of modern Florida remained - and, alas, so did some modern Floridians.
With ``Stormy Weather'' (Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pp., $24), Hiaasen returns to the grimly hilarious form that powered his first four books, and which was so disappointingly lacking in his last, ``Strip Tease.''
Like his early novels, this one's stuffed with quick-hit humor, wiseguy dialogue and a menagerie of misfit characters. But beneath the hilarious veneer percolates a rage at the century's pillage of a natural wonderland that happens to be Hiaasen's home state.
In that anger lies his strength. For years, Hiaasen - a Miami Herald columnist when he isn't churning out fiction - has been a noisy critic of Florida's cheesy commercial development, slipshod housing, political corruption, run-amok violence and nouveau riche, carpetbagging scum.
His first novel, ``Tourist Season,'' set the pattern for the others: The saga of a newspaper writer turned lunatic eco-terrorist, it careened through a funhouse series of turns and false passages before leaving you so heartsick over the demise of the Everglades that its villain doubled as a hero.
Hiaasen's three subsequent books - ``Double Whammy,'' ``Skin Tight'' and ``Native Tongue'' - pilloried tabloid TV reporters, Disney wannabes, real-estate developers and plastic surgeons, as well as the culture in which they thrive.
Like them, ``Stormy Weather'' has no pretension of being great literature. Its main characters are comic-book caricatures, given to too-clever observations and unlikely profundity. Heroes tend to the angelic. Bad guys are as repulsive in appearance as in deed.
As is Hiaasen's habit, the book is peppered with minor characters described in just enough detail to earn our hatred before they're disposed of, a device that gets a bit wearisome over time.
And its romance, between a prim newlywed New Yorker and a directionless loner, is downright prudish - sex as described by William F. Buckley Jr.
But Hiaasen scores with his portrayal of the human parasites that emerge from the hurricane's wreckage - and, most spectacularly, with the book's one mottled hero, a character sure to transfer well to the screen.
This is former Florida Gov. Clinton Tyree, an avowed environmentalist and certifiable kook, hounded from public office and now in swampy, survivalist exile. Unafraid of violence, disgusted by the absurdity around him, Tyree delivers the book's chief message: that his beloved state is so befouled that its only hope is its utter destruction.
``Obviously, you were impressed by the hurricane,'' he notes to a Yankee tourist lured to the disaster by morbid curiosity. ``Myself, I was disappointed. I was hoping for something more . . . well, biblical.''
The absence of such a take-no-prisoners attitude is what doomed ``Strip Tease'' to irrelevancy. That extremely popular book fired up all of Hiaasen's storytelling skills but lacked fire in the belly.
Thankfully, while Andrew may not have provided Florida a much-needed karmic cleansing, it at least got one of the state's most entertaining writers back on track. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
TIM CHAPMAN
Carl Hiaasen vents his anger over the sad state of Florida.
by CNB