‘He’s a whole different person,’ Trish whispered.
‘Good,’ Krome said. ‘He needed to be.’
(Lucky You, page 446)
Carl Hiaasen’s campaign to make you loathe and despise Americans for their stupidity, greed and violence continues in this, his seventh solo novel, set among the slimy lowlifes, retards, rednecks and religious nutcases of South Florida.
Each Hiaasen novel has a central theme from which a complex matrix of crazy events and related sub-themes unfurl. This one is the Florida state lottery. On the week in question there are two winners of the lottery who have to share the prize money of $28 million and this is enough to trigger a 480-page firestorm of greed, crime and corruption.
JoLayne Lucks
One of the winners is JoLayne Lucks, 35, a physically fit black woman who lives in a trailer park (Hiaasen’s favourite location for his collections of lowlifes and criminals). JoLayne’s hobby is breeding turtles. She has 46, all different species, in an aquarium outside her trailer (so they’re pretty small, 3 or 4 inches long with heads ‘the size of grapes’, p.379).
Bode and Chub
But what spices things up and drives the plot is that the other winners are a pair of educationally sub-normal rednecks: Bodean James Gazzer, 31, five foot six, who’s made a career of blaming everyone else for everything that’s gone wrong in his short shitty life, who’s recently gotten interested in anti-government militias of the Waco Siege and Oklahoma City bombing variety (backstory pages 18 to 22), and so who’s drifted into the white supremacist ‘culture of hate and hardcore bigotry’ (p.20). Bode makes a living creating forged documents.
A couple of months before the start of the narrative, Bode had hooked up with Chub, a beer-gutted six-foot-two, ponytailed, unshaven, unwashed, smelly slob (full name: Onus Dean Gillespie, backstory page 96). The two bond over a shared contempt for:
government, taxes, homosexuals, immigrants, minorities, gun laws, assertive women and honest work. (p.3)
In fact, as the story opens Bode has just decided to set up a militia named The White Rebel Brotherhood (p.36). For the rest of the novel Hiaasen has a lot of fun attributing every prejudice and bigotry going to the short, angry, venomous Bode, and his dumb, grunting sidekick, Chub. It is the couple’s ignorant but venomous race-hatred and bigotry which is the real subject of this novel.
Having read half a dozen Hiaasen novels I fully expected that Bode would end up committing a string of heinous crimes and then being grotesquely killed in the end and, having just completed it, I can tell you that’s exactly what happens.
Tom Krome the journalist
Hiaasen was and is a rather renegade, award-winning journalist and his first novels feature some very renegade journalists who, you imagine, are like fictional versions of himself let completely off the leash. The series starts with the protagonist of his first solo novel, Tourist Season, the award-winning journalist Skip Wiley, who goes beyond the bounds of ordinary journalism by setting up an eco-terrorist group.
Here in Lucky You there’s another of these journalist incarnations, this one named Tom Krome. Krome emerges as the decent bloke hero of the story. He also allows Hiaasen to share his thoughts on what’s happened to the newspaper business in the 20 or so years since he joined it back in the 1970s. This is that the newspaper industry has been eviscerated by accountants, keen to dispense with almost all the editorial content and to sack seasoned journalists, in order to turn newspapers large and small into efficient, advertising-revenue-generating machines with the result, as his managing editor comments, that the news gets softer and softer, contains less and less real journalism, more and more fluff about pageants and fetes, until nobody bothers reading it any more (p.321).
Interesting to read laments about the death of journalism and newspapers from 25 years ago. Newspapers are, nowadays, of course, in an even more parlous condition.
Anyway, Tom Krome is depicted as a good journalist, with old-school instincts for following a story. with the result that he’s found himself fired from a number of papers till he’s ended up at the minor league Register, where he has to answer to an idiot named Sinclair, Assistant Managing Editor of Features and Style, and stuck covering weddings and divorces. It rankles – a lot!
Grange, town of religious visions
Now JoLayne Lucks lives in an area called Grange, which is notorious for its religious sightings and miracles.
Grange’s meagre economy had come to rely on the seasonal Christian tourist trade. (p.420)
We know this from a number of storylines and events:
- Tom Krome’s new girlfriend, Katie (who is cheating on her husband, Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr.) is a True Believer in miracles and healing.
- One of JoLayne’s neighbours in the Grange trailer park, Demencio, operates a religious fraud: he owns and displays a four-foot-high statue of the Virgin Mary with a reservoir of scented water inside, which is operated by a footpump so that the waiting queue of the faithful each get to kiss the statue and see miracle-working tears trickle from its yes. That’s before or after they’ve bought some of Demencio’s over-priced mementos and merchandising, which is where he makes his money.
- But Demencio isn’t the only one. There are various other religious fradusters around who capitalise on the town’s reputation, not least a failed carpenter by the name of Dominick Armado who, one drunk night, at a very low ebb in his private life, drilled perfect half centimetre holes in both his hands and now touts them as miraculous stigmata, charging a few dollars a time to allow credulous pilgrims to touch them, pray to them or have their photo taken with God’s Chosen One (p.378).
As a character wonders, late in the novel, having encountered all this religious nuttery, and after Armado has insisted on showing her the new holes he’s drilled in his feet, surely there must be something which explains all the freakery:
Surely this could be explained – a radiation leak in the maternity ward; a toxin in the town’s water supply. (p.460)
Early plot
The plot gets going when Tom Kromer is reluctantly sent out out to Grange to interview some blah blah lottery winner on what he thinks will be the epitome of boring small-time journalism. But Krome is won over by JoLayne’s style and balls. He arrives to find her front door is open and, on knocking and entering, discovers her in her bath, butt-naked, covered in bubbles and holding a shotgun pointing at his groin. So: quite ballsy, then. JoLayne listens to what Krome’s got to say, then politely refuses to be interviewed or to feature in any news reports. He goes back to his motel to ponder his next move.
What drives the novel is that the two thick racists, Bode and Chub, are not content with getting half the week’s winnings. They want it all. So Bode insists that they, also, drive out to Grange, They quickly establish that there’s only one lottery ticket outlet in the little town, at a branch of the Grab’N’Go chain, and they work out that JoLayne is the likely winner by cross-questioning the shops’ dim assistant named ‘Shiner’, the useless son of a born-again Christian mother.
Bode and Chub drive to JoLayne’s trailer and beat the crap out of her in a bid to get her ticket. Their plan is that Bode will present to the lottery authorities with one ticket and claims half the $28 million, and Chubb will present with JoLayne’s and claim the other half. The lottery tickets are sold anonymously, there are no names attached, so whoever is holding it is the owner.
Bode and Chub savagely beat JoLayne, introducing a sickening note of violence into the book at an early stage. They punch her in the breasts and groin and push the barrel of their revolver into her mouth, demanding to know where the ticket is. But not before JoLayne uses her long fingernails to give them cuts on the face, to rip out half of Bode’s eyelid and half of Chub’s eyebrow. She’s feisty.
It’s a stalemate until the rednecks have a brainwave: they shoot one of her precious baby turtles and threaten to shoot all the rest, at which point JoLayne gives in and hands over the ticket. They beat her up a bit more and leave. On the way out of town they revisit the Grab N’Go where they recruit the idiot Shiner to their fledgling White Rebel Brotherhood, explaining to him that all his failure in life is due to a conspiracy of fags and blacks in Washington DC, and (the reason for making a fuss of him) persuading him to lie about serving JoLayne the winning ticket.
Tom Kromer is woken up in the dark of his Grange motel bedroom. It takes him a while to realise it’s JoLayne who’s snuck into his room. When she won’t let him switch on the light and he puts his hands up to her face, he realises she’s been really badly beaten.
She takes him back to her trailer which is wrecked, with blood everywhere. Tom begs JoLayne to go to the cops but she refuses. Tom eventually realises it’s because she thinks if the cops start searching for them, the two hoodlums will destroy the ticket and she needs that ticket. Why?
And here enters the environmental angle, which is such an important element in Hiaasen’s fiction and which had been missing from the narrative up to this point. Turns out JoLayne works as an assistant to Dr Cecil Crawford, Grange’s vet (p.51) and has a natural feel for animals. In her time off she likes to sneak into Simmons Wood, a lovely piece of unspoilt wilderness and observe the wild animals (backstory p.137).
The point is that one day JoLayne is horrified to see a notice up warning that Simmons Wood is going to be demolished and turned into a shopping mall. She wants the lottery winnings not for herself but in order to buy Simmons Wood and preserve it for future generations. So that’s why she doesn’t want to call the cops or have her story written up in the papers; because that might force the thieves to destroy the ticket and she needs that money.
(The wood is owned by an old man, Lighthorse Simmons, who used to love to hunt there. He’s gotten old now and on his last trip was accidentally shot by another hunter. Now it’s his two greedy children, Leander Simmons and Janine Simmons Robinson, who are selling the land off and greedily hoping to make the maximum profit.)
Mary Andrea Finlay Krome
Tom has a wife, Mary Andrea Finlay, who he’s been trying to divorce for four years. She fancies herself a leading actress, although she only appears in provincial theatres. Tom’s attorney, Dick Turnquist, has been trying to serve papers for divorce on her for years, but it’s one of the running gags of the story that Mary is constantly on the move, one step ahead of the lawyer and his endless quest. The narrative is punctuated by the lawyer periodically phoning up Tom for another bulletin on how he just failed to nab her yet again.
Katie and the judge
Then there’s Katie, wife of Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. Tom has been having an affair with Katie for precisely 14 days, a whirlwind of sex and guilt, because Katie, in between blowjobs, is also a devout Christian, who has championship sex and then days of chronic guilt.
Because Kromer doesn’t ring her that night, from the motel in Grange where he’s staying, Katie has a fit of religious conscience and decides to admit to her husband she’s having an affair. More than that, in a fit of compulsive honesty she lists to the judge every sexual encounter she’s had with Krome, starting with the first blowjob she gave him in his car. American Christians are such fun! She’s also motivated by the knowledge that her 40-something husband is screwing both his legal secretaries, Willow and Vine. Katie hopes that if she confesses to her adulteries, he will too. Of course he doesn’t. But he is furious and instantly decides to take revenge.
Which is why, when Krome gets back to Miami from his brief trip to Grange, he discovers all the windows in his house shot out. Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. had gotten his legal assistant, Champ Powell, to do it.
When Tom phones her, Katie drives right round, explains what has happened, apologises, says she thinks it’s best, under the circumstances, to call off their affair and, as an afterthought, mentions that she thinks her husband, in his psychopathic jealousy, is going to have Krome killed. Great. Just great. A few blowjobs and fancy fucks and now his life is in danger, thinks Tom.
When Krome checks back into the office of the Register his numbskull editor, Sinclair, declares the lottery story dead and assigns him something else. Krome refuses to take it. He wants to track down whoever beat up JoLayne, he wants to turn it into a real journalistic investigation. Sinclair refuses to budge. So Krome quits and walks out. He calls JoLayne and tells her he wants to help her get her ticket back and save Simmons Wood.
The mob
Then there’s the mafia connection. Hiaasen goes into some detail to explain that the people who want to buy Simmons Wood – who Leander Simmons and Janine Simmons Robinson are so keen to sell to – are actually organised crime.
Richard ‘The Icepick’ Tarbone is a major player in organised crime in Chicago. He regularly creams off large amounts from the accounts of a big union called the Central Midwest Brotherhood of Grouters, Spacklers and Drywallers International. One of the ways this is done is for the union to buy up land and make a big show of investing millions in some project, only to encounter a string of problems, such as lack of labour, strikes, shortage of materials, failure to secure the right permits and so on, which eventually let the project plough into the sand. No-one looks too closely at the accounts to see that the actual losses are over and above the ones posted – and that is the amount creamed off by the union (the process is explained in detail on page 139 and is, according to Hiaasen, common practice in Florida real estate deals: ‘Gangsters bought and sold real estate in Florida every day’, p.440).
Trouble is the realtor in charge of the sale, is Clara Markham, has now received a new bid for the land. It’s from JoLayne who, as soon as she realised she’d won the lottery, got in touch and said she’s outbid all other bidders to buy the wood.
The union’s lawyer aka the Icepick’s fixer, is Bernard Squires. When news comes in that there’s a rival bid the Icepick tells Squires to get his ass down to Florida and sew up the deal in person. Trouble is the realtor in question, Clara Markham, happens to be a good friend of JoLayne’s, not least because of JoLayne’s expert veterinary treatment of Clara’s Persian Cat, Kenny (named after Kenny Rogers, the country singer) and so when JoLayne begs her for a week’s grace (to give her and Tom Krome time to track down the rednecks who stole her lottery ticket), Clara is happy to play along, to Bernard Squires’ mounting frustration.
Moffit
Oh I nearly forgot to mention Moffit. He is a big, imposing, immaculately dressed Afro-American who is an old, old friend of JoLayne’s, they go back to high school and he’s always had a deep and enduring flame for her. And he happens to work for the US Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency.
There’s often a figure like this in Hiaasen’s plots, an old buddy who just happens to have access to government or police computers, a figure who can, therefore, conveniently join the dots and fill in plot holes. Compare with the FBI agent who helps Erin out in Strip Tease.
The quest
Thus it is that by page 100 the narrative has established two damaged people, JoLayne (veteran of six relationships with six loser men and now recovering from a bad beating) and Tom Krome (trying to juggle the demands of his psycho wife, possibly being chased by hitmen set on him by a judge, and now unemployed) decide to track down Bode and Chub (who, being morons, are continuing to use the credit card they stole from JoLayne, and so are leaving a fairly easy trail to follow) and get her lottery ticket back.
And this ‘quest’ is the motor for the next 300 pages of fast-moving, savagely satirical and often very violent narrative. If you are sensitive about racist language, psychology and scenes, this most definitely is not the book for you. The novel takes the reader deep into the damaged psyches of two violent and repellent white supremacists.
Highlights from the rest of the plot
Bode and Chub eat several successive evenings in Hooters restaurant where filthy, slob, face-scratched Chub falls in love with a leggy blonde waitress named Amber who smiles in order to get her tips but finds the pair disgusting.
Once Moffit has learned about JoLayne’s being beaten up and robbed he is very angry and uses computers and cop contacts to identify Chub and visit his apartment. He trashes it, searching thoroughly for the lost lottery ticket, discovering no end of white supremacist posters, guns and porn, before deciding to freak out the racist idiot by writing in three-foot-high red letters on the wall ‘FEAR THE BLACK TIDE’.
When they return to the trashed apartment, this message freaks Bode and Chub out so badly that they pack all their worldly goods and drive south, planning to steal a boat (the ironically named Real Luv) and hide out in the Everglades until they can claim their lottery money and organise their white brotherhood. (In case I haven’t mentioned it, that’s Bode’s plan; to use his winnings to set up a nationwide white Aryan militia.)
Shiner turns up to join them. He’s quit his job at the Grab’N’Go and, in an access of idiotic enthusiasm, has had the initials of the movement tattooed on his bicep. They agree with him to drive south and rendezvous on the coast where they can steal a boat. What the other two don’t expect is that, to please them, Shiner kidnaps Amber from the car park outside Hooters at the end of her shift.
Meanwhile, Tom and JoLayne track down the bad guys by calling her credit card company and finding out where money is being spent. They establish the pair keep eating out at a local Hooters, but spend a long time debating where and how to take the crooks. They have staked out Chub’s apartment so are able to trail them south to a marina where they watch Chub steal a speedboat. Tom and JoLayne themselves hire a boat for a day.
Thus the main setting of the book shifts, rather surprisingly, from an urban setting to an uninhabited island off the coast of Florida, where Bode and Chub and wimpy fat skinhead Shiner and surprisingly tough waitress Amber rig up a miserable camp. A rainstorm hits. Jolayne and Tom have followed at a distance (not least because, like all Hiaasen heroes, Tom is expert on the water, has binoculars to follow the bad guys’ boat at a distance etc). Now they moor their boat on the other side of the island, and stalk and watch developments among the baddies.
The grotesque highlight
Each Hiaasen novel has a grotesque highlight, a memorably gruesome image which stays with you. In Double Whammy it’s the redneck killer with a dead pitbull’s head attached to his wrist. In Stormy Weather it’s the crooked property salesman crucified to an outsized satellite TV dish by a disgruntled customer. In this novel, it involves the drooling idiot Chub.
Chub, among his countless other vices, snorts glue or aerosols. At various points in the narrative he manages to make himself insensible on whatever sniffable substance he can lay his hands on. On the boat trip out to the island Chub makes himself so blotto on a tube of boat glue he finds, that he passes out with his hand trailing in the water only to wake and find half of it eaten off by a giant crab.
This section on the island drags on a bit, with various arguments and shifts in psychological dynamic between the three white supremacists and their waitress hostage described at what begins to feel like inordinate length.
Tom and JoLayne rescue Amber, Bode dies
Eventually, in a fury of frustration, Chub finally tries to rape Amber and she is fighting him off when there’s a gunshot. Chub is thrown off Amber’s naked body because Tom has just shot half his shoulder away, swiftly followed by a shotgun butt to the head which knocks Bode unconscious.
Tom and JoLayne patch up Chub to stop him bleeding to death, then put Shiner and Amber into the stolen boat, with a map and instructions to go back to civilisation, which they do without mishap.
But, as so often happens (as happened in the very similar situation in Stormy Weather), although they’ve tied up the bad guys, one of them – Bode – manages to get loose and makes a run for it through the mangrove groves to the other end of the island where Tom and JoLayne’s boat is moored.
Except Tom chases him and tackles him in the shallows, they both thrash around kicking and punching. Unfortunately, Bode kicks a stingray which was having a quiet nap on the mud floor and responds by embedding its big sting deep in his thigh. Bode lets go of Tom who staggers upright, himself half-drowned in the epic struggle, then pulls Bode in from the shallows onto the sand. And here he bleeds to death (p.397). Yes, I thought he’d meet a sticky end, Hiaasen’s baddies always do.
The judge, his assistant and the exploding house
This main central plank of the narrative is interspersed with two other plot developments:
Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. gets cold feet. Having had all Tom’s windows shot out he becomes paranoid that Tom will track him down and do something bad to him and/or write about him in his newspaper. So the judge decides that he must not only scare Tom Krome, but kill him! So he gets his legal secretary, Champ Powell, to blow up his house. Champ is a whizz at the law but less so at arson and pours out so much gasoline round Tom’s empty house that he passes out, falling against the cooker as he does so, and blowing the house to kingdom come, killing himself. His body is charred beyond recognition in the ensuing fire. The point is – everyone now thinks the corpse in the house was Tom: everyone thinks Tom is dead, from his managing editor at the newspaper (who didn’t even know he’d quit), to his lawyer, his wife he’s trying to divorce, Katie his lover (who’d admitted everything to the judge) and so on. This sparks a complicated trail of interactions and consequences, while Tom is happily oblivious to it all, far away in the outback trailing the racists.
Sinclair becomes Turtle Boy
Quite a lot earlier in the plot, the editor of the Register had told Sinclair to get his ass up to Grange and find out what Tom Krome was up to and why he wasn’t reporting in to the office (we know it’s because he’s followed the bad guys out to the island but nobody else knows that).
Sinclair does so, and tracks down the house of JoLayne and her neighbours, Demencio and Trisha, but here something weird happens: he has a spiritual awakening.
When JoLayne left with Tom, she asked her neighbours Femencio and Trisha to look after JoLayne’s 46 little turtles and, business with the Weeping Virgin falling a bit slack, Demencio has a brainwave. Why not paint the faces of the 12 apostles onto the shells of 12 of the turtles and claim they appeared overnight? The scam is a runaway success, drawing in thousands of paying believers to the aquarium the pair set up specially for the ‘Holy Turtles’.
Now when Sinclair, poking around to find Tom Krome, is introduced to Demencio and Trisha, when they give him one of the lickle baby turtles to hold, Sinclar has a profound spiritual experience, is converted on the spot. He takes to wearing a white gown and immersing himself in the lined trench Demencio builds for the apostle turtles and letting them crawl all over him. He forgets about his job, he forgets about Tom Krome, he experiences otherworldly bliss and speaks in tongues.
Soon rumour gets round of the freak Demencio nicknames ‘Turtle Boy’, and Sinclair finds himself becoming a major religious attraction in his own right.
There’s quite a lot more plot complexity and detail, because one of the central aspects of the genre of farce is that it has a preposterously convoluted plot.
The bad judge is arrested
By the time Tom and JoLayne return safely to civilisation the threat against him has been lifted. The police have by this stage realised the corpse in Tom’s house was not him but the judge’s legal assistant, and the judge’s wife, Katie, has told the police all about the judge’s arsonical felonies, so that the judge has forgotten about Tom and is packing to escape to the Bahamas. Only to walk out his front door and be arrested by the FBI (p.430). So that storyline, which had taken up a lot of space and complexity, is happily resolved.
Thoughts and reflections
1. White supremacy and race anxiety
Religion is the most obvious and flagrant subject of the satire, what with Demencio’s weeping Madonna and the apostle turtle scams (not to mention Shiner’s born-again mother who I haven’t mentioned so far but insists she can see the face of Jesus printed on the local highway and eventually goes into a kind of religious partnership with Turtle Boy.
But the religious satire is overshadowed by the novel’s larger, more serious theme, which is race, or race relations in America. It is the central theme in Bode and Chub’s lives that they plan to set up a militia named The White Rebel Brotherhood dedicated to the salvation of the white race, against the great tide of blacks, Hispanics, gays and lesbians and liberals and Jews who they see as taking over their country. Their paranoia is satirised in Bode’s incoherent notion that a vast UN or NATO force is waiting on the Bahamas and, at any moment, will invade mainland America and suppress the white race in the name of the international conspiracy of thingummy, something – whenever he gets to this point, in his explanations to Chub or Shiner, Bode gets confused and angry, realising his paranoid delusions don’t actually make sense (pp.351).
The pair’s stupidity is satirised by the way Bode doesn’t realise the White Rebel Brotherhood is the name of a popular rap band. When he learns this it infuriates him, so that Bode changes the name of his little gang to the White Clarion Aryans, who:
‘We believe in the purity and supremacy of the Euro-Caucasian people.’ (p.299)
So far, so dumb, so satirical and so fairly funny. But it isn’t funny when they beat the crap out of JoLayne and grab her breasts and punch her in the groin calling her the n word. A ‘bad’ word here or there is piss in the wind compared to the force of their deep, raging, unrelenting, racist bigotry.
Hiaasen goes some way to investigating the roots of the problem, with periodic explanations that the roots of their hatred lie in the endless frustrations of lazy, stupid, badly educated, dropout, unemployed, lowlife, small-time criminals.
But towards the end of the book there’s a powerful scene where JoLayne cradles the badly wounded Chub in her lap, tending to the wound Tom has just shot in his shoulder (to stop him raping Amber) because she can’t bear to see anything die. JoLayne asks him directly the reason for his unrelenting rage. But all she gets back is cuss words (p.391). Nothing can be explained. These people are too damaged to change and too mentally limited to reflect on their own lives and beliefs.
Same when Bode is dying. JoLayne pitifully asks him:
‘Please. I’m trying to understand the nature of your hatefulness…What did I ever do to you?’ She demanded. ‘What did any black person ever do to you?’ (p.398)
To which Bode can only reply with a thin list of petty offences, none of which get at the real psychological root of such monstrous anger and hate.
On a different plane, the issue of race recurs in the ‘mixed race’ relationship between white Tom and black JoLayne. This mainly takes the shape of her teasing him about his white liberal guilt (p.346) and his honky ass. There’s the moment in the car driving south when she takes the mickey out of the way he only likes ‘white-boy rock’, triggering a spluttering defence on his part, which makes her crack up with laughter (p.244).
This is meant to be fairly light-hearted joshing but to me, at any rate, indicated yet another way in which racial differences seem to be so difficult to normalise. All I mean is that JoLayne and Tom are as liberal individuals as it is possible to imagine, and yet even for them, the difference in skin or race or ethnicity or whatever you want to call it, still creates nervousness and imbalances of power. Can it ever be completely neutral, a relationship between a black person and a white person, completely without an awareness of race? Not if this novel is to be believed.
Anyway, back to Bode and Chub and their pathetic white supremacy, Hiaasen gives it a thorough and extended hammering, but satire doesn’t change anything in the real world. Hiaasen was mocking white supremacy and ignorant bigotry back in 1997 yet Donald Trump came to power on the back of a huge sea of it 20 years later, and his presidency climaxed in the amazing scenes of the Proud Boys storming the Capitol and waving the Confederate flag.
The problem doesn’t seem to have gotten any better in the 24-odd years since 1997, does it? Writing savagely satirical novels isn’t enough. Nowhere near.
2. America, criminal state
Last time I went to New York I hated it. I watched American TV, listened to American radio, saw American hoardings, browsed in American shops, and felt suffocated by it, by the unrelenting commercialisation of everything. There seems to be little or no natural interaction between human beings behaving innocently, politely and candidly. Absolutely everything is monetised, is a deal, every service in a shop or hotel or taxi requires a tip. Money is front of everyone’s mind.
And that’s what comes over in Hiaasen’s books. There’s no character that doesn’t have an angle. They are all after something, and they all spend all their time calculating the odds, the profits and losses, of every deal and every venture. Demencio’s religious frauds are obvious butts for satire, but there isn’t much essential difference between that and the various crooked lawsuits we learn Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. has been involved in. Everyone is faking and lying for money.
Hiaasen gives a particularly detailed explanation of how the judge swings one last crooked judgement before he realises he has to flee the Feds. He finds in favour of a well-known insurance fraudster, 70-year-old Emil LaGort who makes a living out of tripping or falling at supermarkets then suing them for negligence (p.374). Generally, LaGort’s claims are thrown out or he settles for small fees, but the judge rings up LaGort’s attorney and advises him to go hard on the next case. The lawyer is puzzled. The judge explains that, if the lawyer sues LaGort’s latest corporate target for $500,000, he (the judge) will find in his favour – on the understanding that LaGort’s attorney will then give him half that amount. Why? To pay for his hurried flight to the Bahamas.
In other words: the American legal system is not just a bit crooked, it is one enormous scam, from top to bottom, a vast system of interlocking scams and deals at every level, greased by money and bribery.
These aren’t generalised slurs. Hiaasen gives detailed descriptions of hos America’s countless scams and cons work in practice. He explains in great detail the mafia scheme for creaming money off failed building projects, described above. The mafia makes money by commissioning large-scale property developments which are then left deliberately incomplete and declared write-offs, so the mob can launder money through them. The result is to leave Florida covered with abandoned works, whose sole material impact is to devastate the landscape. And this is happening all the time, has been going on for decades.
Hiaasen’s America is all like that, at every level. You can visualise a hierarchy, like a medieval diagram of the ‘estates’, with scumbags like Bode and Chub at the bottom, organised criminals like The Icepick and his fixer Bernard Squires at a higher level, doing deals with bribeable cops, supervised by crooked judges like Battenkill, and then the crooked local politicians Hiaasen has lambasted in other novels sitting at the top, easy to buy and influence with big dollar campaign contributions, the whole thing covered by a TV and print media which are themselves only interesting in keeping the gravy train of corruption and payola spinning forwards in order to bring in those advertising dollars. Money money money. An unending panorama of greed and corruption in every direction.
And then, in a stroke of genius, you give all these crooks and retards and mobsters and hitmen high-powered guns and automatic weapons and let them loose on each other.
Everyone who lived in Dade County knew the sound of a semiautomatic.’ (p.311)
It’s a modern vision of the Inferno. It is contemporary America. In the week since I finished reading the book I think there have been three mass shootings in America, one just yesterday in Hiaasen’s own Miami. What a great country.
3. Americans have a word for it
As part of their can-do, get a move on, hurry hurry culture, Americans just seem to have snappy nouns and catchy phrases to describe things and actions that the English bumble over. A few examples being:
- to cinch = verb, when you’re wearing a hat with a loop of string under the chin and a toggle which you can move up the two bits of string to tighten them up, you ‘cinch’ it tight; women cinch a scrunchie on their hair
- a domelight = the overhead light in a car (p.249)
- to fishtail = verb, to have the rear end of a car slide from side to side. ‘Recklessly he gunned the truck across Highway One and fishtailed into the northbound lane.’ (p.265)
- a hummer = a blowjob (p.325)
- a ride-along = someone who comes along for a ride in a car (p.400)
- walk-ons = when you run a boat hire company in a marina and you get customers who haven’t booked ahead but just walk up and ask if they can hire
Credit
Lucky You by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1997. All references are to the 1998 Pan paperback edition.
Carl Hiaasen reviews
- Tourist Season (1986)
- Double Whammy (1987)
- Skin Tight (1989)
- Native Tongue (1991)
- Strip Tease (1993)
- Stormy Weather (1995)
- Lucky You (1997)
- Sick Puppy (2000)
- Basket Case (2002)
- Skinny Dip (2004)
- Nature Girl (2006)
- Star Island (2010)
- Bad Monkey (2013)
- Razor Girl (2016)
- Squeeze Me (2020)
Books & Boots 