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Hiaasen tilts at substantial windmills
Book Review
By Derryll White
Hiaasen, Carl (1993). Strip Tease.
If winter gets you down, if the cold gives you the blues, fortify yourself – read Carl Hiaasen. If the luscious Florida setting doesn’t chase away the winter blaas, then Hiaasen’s quirky humour will make you smile and laugh out loud. His biting sarcasm skewers fickle American politicians and economic greed wherever it occurs. As one commentator said of Hiaasen’s work, “humour is an effective treatment for the cancer of corruption.”
And corruption is everywhere. Hiaasen is tilting at substantial windmills in this book – the U.S. Congress, the judicial system and the huge, wealthy sugar cane cartels. In fact, in this novel Erin Grant, the stripper and mother, is the most honest and straightforward character. She strips for the money, honey.
This is a fun read. Nothing escapes Hiaasen’s skewer, and he is merciless. The zany antics of the sugar cane capitalists and, the unfailing greed of the American political system are both contrasted with the honesty and mother instinct of a talented stripper who only dances. And of course in the end, truth and justice triumphs – kind of. I sat in Hot Shots Café and laughed my head off, even though some looked quizzically at the tassles on the cover of the book the laughing maniac was reading. Kudos to Hiaasen.
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Excerpts from the novel:
FREE ENTERPRISE – Every few years, the Congress of the United States of America voted generous price supports for a handful of agricultural millionaires in the great state of Florida. The crop that made them millionaires was sugar, the price of which was grossly inflated and guaranteed by the U.S. government. This brazen act of plunder accomplished two things: it kept American growers very wealthy, and it undercut the struggling economies of poor Caribbean nations which couldn’t sell their own bounties of cane to the United States at even half the bogus rate.
CONTROL – It taught Erin one of life’s great lessons: an attractive woman could get whatever she wanted, because men were so laughably weak. They would do anything for even the distant promise of sex.
LOBBYISTS – “What a deal these bastards get. All the water they want for practically nothing. Imported slave labor for the harvest. Then they get to sell the crop [cane sugar] at jacked-up prices, courtesy of the U.S. Congress. And when they’re all done, they’re allowed to dump the stink straight into the Everglades.”
POLLUTION – By the 1970s, the once dazzling underwater reefs of Miami and Fort Lauderdale were dead, poisoned by raw sewage dumped into the ocean from the toilets of swank waterfront hotels. Submerged pipes carried the filth a few hundred yards offshore, so beachgoers wouldn’t see the billowing brown spumes. It was assumed that even the most dogged tourist might think twice about snorkeling in a torrent of shit.
LOBBYISTS – Lately the state of Florida had been pestering operators of phosphate mines about dumping their radioactive sludge into the public groundwater. The phosphate industry regarded as subversive the idea of cleansing its own waste and burying it safely; Malcolm Moldowsky had been hired at a six-figure fee to plead the cause with his old pal, the governor, so that the regulatory climate at the mines might return to normal.
LOCAL COLOUR – Breakfast predawn, A truckstop on old Route 441, jammed with semis, dumptrucks, dairy tankers, pickups, flatbeds hauling farm equipment. The place smelled like a diesel fart.
– 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.
