CARL HIAASEN / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
Florida is worth
the trouble.
A reporter’s attention. A novelist’s imagination.
A place that keeps giving both something to do.
By Rob Urban
Florida deserves a writer who is difficult to impress.
It also deserves a writer who cares what happens to it. The two qualities belong together in my admiration for Carl Hiaasen.
His work invites a wonderfully complicated affection for a place: pleasure in its beauty, delight in its oddness, and a continuing interest in what people are doing with both. The landscape has inhabitants. A decision has consequences. The most confident person in the room may need a follow-up question.
There is energy in that kind of attention. It makes a familiar place feel worth examining again, down to the creatures near the ground and the people who have been explaining away their disappearance.
The joke can carry concern because the writer has something he wants us to notice.
THE NEWSROOM
A voice, and the people
who helped it travel.
Hiaasen’s official biography traces his Miami Herald work from city reporting through the magazine and investigations team to an opinion column that ran from 1985 to 2021.
His first novels were collaborations with fellow journalist William D. Montalbano. Their three thrillers drew on their reporting experience. The biography also credits editor Diane Stevenson for the collections of Hiaasen’s newspaper columns.
I like seeing those collaborators in the account. A voice we recognize as singular can develop through years of working with other people who care about a sentence and what stands behind it.
Reporting gives a writer reasons to keep asking. Editing gives the work another attentive reader before it reaches the public.
The resulting career belongs to a literary imagination and to a newsroom history. Both help explain why the Florida in Hiaasen’s work feels populated by interests, arrangements and people with something at stake.
THE PLACE
You thought you could
show it to your child.
In David Bowman’s 2000 Salon interview, Hiaasen describes hearing from readers who had returned to a pond or lake remembered from childhood and found it gone.
That detail gets beneath the large language of environmental concern. The place had a position in someone’s life. They expected to be able to find it again, perhaps to show it to a child.
I think that helps explain the feeling beneath his satire. Knowing a place means carrying a history of it. A change can disturb something intimate as well as something public.
Hiaasen also remembers receiving an unsolicited, encouraging note about Tourist Season from John D. MacDonald. It is a lovely moment of one Florida writer recognizing another.
Concern for a landscape and encouragement for a writer both involve noticing something worth keeping. The interview makes room for that affection alongside the sharper edges of his work.
THE OWLS
Someone already
lives here.
The premise of Hoot gives concern a particularly clear address: a colony of burrowing owls occupies the proposed site of a pancake restaurant.
The author’s synopsis introduces a new kid, a bully, a renegade friend and a collection of Florida creatures. The book, published in 2002, received a Newbery Honor.
What interests me in that setup is the collision of perspectives. To one party, the site is where a restaurant will go. To the owls, it is already occupied. The children become attentive to something the plan has failed to respect.
There is plenty of room for comedy in the distance between an adult’s confident explanation and a child’s obvious question.
I appreciate a premise that gives young readers that position. Their curiosity can matter. They can notice what other people have chosen to overlook, and the noticing can set a story in motion.
THE FISHING TOURNAMENT
A small world.
Considerable ambition.
For a different register of Hiaasen’s imagination, consider the official description of Double Whammy.
A private investigator, R. J. Decker, enters a murder story entangled with high-stakes bass fishing. A sport that might sound like an escape from everyday ambition becomes a setting for it.
That is an excellent comic opening. A specialized world brings its own rules, language, equipment and prestige. People can take their position within it very seriously indeed.
I enjoy the invitation to look closely at an apparently narrow subject. Specificity gives a story possibilities that a generic setting cannot supply. The competition means something to these people. Their conduct has a particular arena.
Florida becomes richer on the page when its activities have that degree of texture. There are different worlds within the state, each with its own ways of becoming ridiculous.
THE GOLFER
The joke can include
the person telling it.
Hiaasen also allows himself into the comedy.
In the publisher’s interview about The Downhill Lie, his account of returning to golf after decades away, he explains that writing about the game meant writing about his father and children.
He credits Mike Lupica with encouraging him to keep a journal of the attempted comeback. The conversation includes friendship, family and a thoroughly unglamorous appraisal of his own game.
That is an appealing companion to the novels. A writer with a sharp eye for other people’s ambitions can also recognize the comedy of his own.
The family history gives the subject warmth. A game can be frustrating and still contain time with someone you love. Its value can exceed the score, even when the score remains capable of ruining an afternoon.
I like the room that leaves for affection inside the joke.
My admiration for Hiaasen begins with the attention he gives Florida and grows with the range of that attention.
There is the reporter’s interest in what happened, the novelist’s appetite for what might happen next, and the humorist’s instinct for the detail that makes an arrangement suddenly look absurd.
There are also the people who helped make the work: a fellow reporter writing novels with him, an editor shaping collections, another writer sending encouragement, a friend suggesting he keep a journal.
That fuller picture is worth holding onto. A memorable voice has a life around it.
Hiaasen gives readers pleasure in the telling and reasons to care about the place being told. For a Florida writer, that combination has a particular appeal. The state remains beautiful, exasperating and inexhaustibly worth a closer look.
Sources: Hiaasen’s official biography and book descriptions; David Bowman’s Salon interview; and the publisher’s author interview for The Downhill Lie. Linked throughout. The discussions of Hoot and Double Whammy concern their published premises. Interpretation by Rob Urban.
For more of my writing about place: Florida Stories and Writing Florida as a Character.