Book Review

By Derryll White

Hiaasen, Carl (2020).  Squeeze Me.

                  The mediation by the serpent was necessary.  Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man. – Franz Kafka

Carl Hiaasen always delivers an outrageous, amazing political and environmental tour-de-force.  ‘Squeeze Me’ does not disappoint.  The author cuts closer to the central problem of our collective residency on this planet with every novel he publishes.

For Hiaasen Florida is the microcosm of all the forces which are stealing our future from us.  Over-population, greed, an insistence on self above all else – he hits every button on the elevator going down to self-destruction.

Through it all Hiaasen makes the reader laugh, uproariously many times, at ourselves. He creates a wonderful character in Angie Armstrong, a specialist in problem wildlife removal.  Angie is serious about her profession, sexy, circumspect and driven.  Following her through the morass of political life in Florida, and specifically in the Presidential enclosure, is an education.

Hiaasen makes the reader cry for the planet, and laugh at the foibles of our own species.  It may take the reader a little to figure out who PROTUS is, and to grapple with the concept of the PROTUS Pussies (the Potussies) but that is only because we are removed from so much in Canada, and more particularly in rural B.C.  The ‘big picture’ however, is immediately graspable.  Hiaasen has taken political sarcasm (and the comic crime novel) to a whole new level.  Readers beware – crazy laughter zone.

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Excerpts from the novel:

PRESIDENTIAL PICTURE – “Hell no, use the White House photographer!  Two minutes and you’re done.  Christ, they’ve been trying to get a picture with you for years,” the President said.  “I need to throw ‘em a bone.  They donate a shit-ton of cash.”

    He wore silk burgundy pyjamas and sat barefoot on the edge of the bed.  His feet were like moist loaves, the tiny toes appearing more decorative than functional.  Mockingbird sometimes found it hard to believe this was the same man she’d married; he looked like a different person now – as if someone had put a fire hose up his ass and inflated him with meringue.  His ego seemed to have swollen proportionately.

REAL POLITICS – The Commander’s Ball had been staged every spring since Mastodon’s election.  Lovingly organized by the Potussies, it was a giddy, feisty, celebrity-packed tribute to the forever embattled chief executive, and had become his most lucrative political fundraiser.  Tickets started at ten thousand dollars a seat, but for only twice as much you got photographed at the President’s side.  For thirty thousand he would personally sign the photograph; for forty grand he would shake your hand in the picture; for fifty he’d place an arm around your shoulders.  (When advised to avoid physical contact due to the lingering virus threat, Mastodon had berated his doctors and said the risk of a lung infection was less important than the gusher of cash generated by the photo operation.)

ENVIRONMENT – Every year Angie diligently wrote checks to the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund, but she was too much of a loner to jump into the fray.  No meetings, no rallies, no Facebook petitions.  Never once had she fired off an angry letter to a congressman or a county commissioner.  Sometimes she wondered if she was too cynical, or just too lazy.

    The sitting President of the United States was a soulless imbecile who hated the outdoors but, in Angie’s view, at this point Teddy Roosevelt himself couldn’t turn the tide if he came back from the dead.  All the treasured wilderness that had been sacrificed at the altar of growth was gone for all time.  More disappeared every day; nothing ever changed except the speed of destruction, and only because there were fewer pristine pieces to sell off, carve up and pave.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org

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