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Rat's Entertainment!
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19606 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1991 |
1,646 Words |
| Author
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Mark Schaffer
Mark Schaffer, who lives in Washington, D.C., writes
frequently on fiction and popular culture. He is the coeditor
of the forthcoming More Office Humor and is currently working
on a book about the Warner Brothers television studios of the
fifties. |
NATIVE TONGUE
Carl Hiaasen
New York: Knopf, 1991
325 pp., $21.00
With three best-sellers under his belt, reporter and columnist Carl Hiaasen has neatly snagged the undisputed title of pop poet laureate of south Florida. With a diabolically wicked comic sense and a crisply lean style, Hiaasen concocts manic tales of multiculti Florida, brimming with a Hogarthian gallery of indelible characters. Sleaze-bag lawyers, developers, assorted small-time hustlers, wary cops, bewildered tourists, functioning wackos of every stripe--Hiaasen has weaved all these denizens of the hothouse Florida of the booming eighties into wildly entertaining and satiric romps that play with drive-in movie verve. Hiaasen has found totally fresh possibilities in murder, greed, and mayhem that the late, lamented John D. McDonald would have appreciated.
Native Tongue, Hiaasen's latest assault on the sunshine state's love affair with the snow bunnies up north, deliciously aims its comic sights on a long overdue aspect of Florida life, the theme park world. And, while Hiaasen's creation is out of his own head, we know who he's really talking about, don't we? This time our beleaguered hero is close to the writer's heart. A former Miami Herald reporter, Joe Winder has all the earmarks we have come to expect from the cynical newspaper knight-errant. Bounced for running his editor's head through a computer terminal, Winder spends some time at Disney World doing public relations until he's caught in flagrant delicto with a Cinderella understudy in a roller coaster car. Winder winds up at a Disney competitor, the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills in north Key Largo. And this is where Hiaasen revs up his satire machine, as he unreels a loony send-up of Disney World, the crazed world of public relation's animal rights and environmental groups, tourism, and the almighty buck.
Winder seems resigned to his fate at first. One of those ubiquitous guys who knows he's spiraling downward to the tunes of seventies rock heroes, Winder lives with a woman who works a phone-sex line, and spins out cotton candy press releases on the latest marvels offered by the amazing Kingdom of Thrills distinguished owner and founder, one Francis X. Kingsbury. Ostensibly a successful oceanfront developer and pillar of the community, Kingsbury, is, to use one of the author's favorite phrases, "a piece of work." Before plunging into the tourist racket he was in another up north. A small-time mob operator, Frankie King sang his head off for the feds, made some
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