A Kinder, Gentler Carl Hiaasen, Still Pissing People Off
Dave Weich, Powells.com
"A graduate of the University of Florida, at age 23 he joined the Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the newspaper?s weekly magazine and prize-winning investigations team. Since 1985 Hiaasen has been writing a regular column, which at one time or another has pissed off just about everybody in South Florida, including his own bosses."—from Carl Hiaasen's official web site 
By 2002, Florida's native son had produced nine gut-busting, page-turning mysteries, two collections of fiery columns, and a scathing indictment of the Disney empire. Turns out he was just hitting his stride.
Hiaasen's first book for young readers, Hoot, toned down some of the lascivious elements in those adult efforts but maintained everything loyal readers had come to expect. Call it crime comedy with an environmental conscience. Kids ate it up—and the literary establishment agreed: Hoot earned the prestigious Newbery Medal Honor. So what's a bestselling author to do for an encore? 2004's Skinny Dip, a return to grown-up fare, collected the best reviews of his career.
Now Flush builds on that momentum with another engaging entertainment for kids. Hiaasen stopped by Powells.com to talk about all three books, as well as his home state (and constant subject), movie adaptations, bonefishing, bullies, discovering Christopher Paolini, and more.
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"This quick-reading, fun, family adventure harkens back to the Hardy Boys in its simplicity and quirky characters." School Library Journal
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"Carl Hiaasen did not need to get any better....But Skinny Dip... [is] a screwball delight so full of bright, deft, beautifully honed humor that it places Mr. Hiaasen in the company of Preston Sturges, Woody Allen and S. J. Perelman." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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2003 Newbery Medal Honor Book"A wonderful tour-de-force." The Boston Globe "You don?t have to be a young adult to enjoy it." The New York Times Book Review
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"Carl Hiaasen is a lot like Evelyn Waugh. Both simmer with rage, both are consumed with the same overwhelming vision...[both] write the funniest English of this century." Washington Post Book World
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"Hiaasen tops himself here, exploding sardonic marvels on nearly every page....For all the wackiness, Hiaasen never loses control of his rambunctious story of characters, keeping his satire sharply focused and the suspense at full throttle. Great entertainment." Kirkus Reviews
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"This novel could be dangerous to your ribs....Erin Grant, a real-honest-to-God human being, an appealing young woman, and Strip Tease are winners." Donald Westlake, New York Times Book Review
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"The story, about a onetime investigative reporter reduced to writing obituaries, reads much more like mainstream crime fiction than the blend of slapstick nightmare and moral outrage we have come to expect from Hiaasen. But it's a rip-roaringly entertaining tale." Booklist
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"A Day-Glo version of reality that is insanely funny ? and scary." Boston Herald
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"Team Rodent is a swift, hilarious read....But the laughs shouldn't disguise that there is a serious and complex subject here." Charles Taylor, Salon.comClick here to find collections of Hiaasen's columns from the Miami Herald
Dave: I know that some of the material from Hoot
was inspired by your own childhood. Is there a bit of you in [Flush's] Paine Underwood, too, maybe
if you didn't have the outlet of a newspaper column?
Carl Hiaasen: I would have been in big trouble long ago if I didn't
have the columns and the novels as an outlet. I would have ended up either in
jail or negotiating to stay out. I've always said that the writing has been
a legal and socially acceptable outlet for some of the things I feel. If I didn't
have that, God only knows.
Dave: You slip a covert reference to Edward
Abbey into the early pages of Flush.
When did you first discover his writing?
Hiaasen: I hadn't read Ed Abbey's stuff until right after Tourist
Season came out, back in '86. That book dealt with eco-terrorism in a Florida
setting, so some friends of mine said, "Oh, you must have been inspired by Ed
Abbey." I'd never read him.
A good friend of mine at the paper named David
von Drehle, who's now at the Washington Post, gave me a copy of The
Monkey Wrench Gang. Once I'd read that, I read everything, including the
latter biographies and the stuff that was published after he passed away.
I certainly felt that we were some sort of kindred souls in the way we looked
at what was happening to a place we cared about. He was terrific.
Dave: At Salman
Rushdie's reading here last week, he marveled about columnists who write
every week, or even twice a week. "How do they have so many opinions?" he wanted
to know.
Hiaasen: It's a good question. When I started the column at the Herald
twenty years ago, we did three a week, but they were on the Metropolitan page
and they were a little bit shorter than they are now. Now I write for the Op-Ed
page, and I can pretty much write as long as I want. A couple years ago, I decided
that if I was going to try to have a life and stay married and stay acquainted
with my kids, I'd have to find another day in the week somewhere, so I dropped
down to just one a week.
My advantage is that I live in South Florida, where there's an abundance of
material. If you had the energy and it was your job, you could write five columns.
There's just so much going on, and so much of it is outrageous. The writing
energy certainly ebbs at times but the material is always there.
Dave: When Susan
Orlean was here to promote The
Orchid Thief, we talked a bit about what makes Florida unique. She brought
up the fact that it's the only contiguous state that's barely connected; most
of it is out in the ocean.
I read in one of your columns that one out of every seven new homes built in the
US is in Florida. That's staggering.
Hiaasen: It's actually higher than that now.
The conservative figure for the daily destruction of pristine property is
about 450 acres a day. A day. Because it's warm and many parts of Florida
are beautiful, it's always had a magnetic attraction. Once air conditioning
was invented, Florida was doomed. Air conditioning and mosquito repellent destined
Florida to be overrun.
Up until that point, it was an inhospitable place. Even Flagler,
running his railroad down there—that opened up the coastline for development,
but no one was going to the interior, nobody but the Seminole Indians, who had
been forced to go there. Now, it's open season.
This is particularly relevant in this hurricane season. One of the great tragedies
you saw in New Orleans was the great mass of people that had to leave; many
of them have no places to come back to. We're building along these coastlines
in places we were never meant to inhabit.
The ocean reclaims beach after beach in Florida every year. If a good hurricane
came right at, let's say, Miami or metropolitan Ft. Lauderdale, you would have
chaos and bedlam trying to evacuate four and a half million people. But we foolishly
cram in as many people as we can. There's no thought given to what nature has done
in a cyclical way for thousands and thousands of years. This is nothing new
historically. What's new is that we've never had so many people living on the
coastline as we do today.
Dave: Were you ever tempted to go to D.C. or some other city more central
to national news?
Hiaasen: No. In the thirty years I've been at the Herald, they've
lost hundreds of terrific journalists to the Washington Post, New
York Times, Wall Street Journal.... The difference is that I was
born and raised there. It's my home.
There's no sane reason to stay in a place like South Florida if you don't
have some roots and some affection for the place, but there are parts of it
that are worth fighting for, and that's what I do, as futile as it appears on
most days.
I need that anger to write. And it's not just the columns; it's the
novels, too. One bleeds into the other. Washington is great—every four
or eight years, a new influx of nitwits and scammers and charlatans and fraud
artists and blowhards moves in and out of that city—but in the larger
picture, my emotional attachment is to Florida.
Dave: If you were to poll readers, who would they say is your most
despicable character?
Hiaasen: From the feedback I get it, I think it's a lobbyist named
Palmer Stoat from Sick Puppy.
He seemed to generate a lot of ill will. People were very happy at the end of
the book with what happened to him, which I won't give away.
In a book called Skin Tight,
I wrote a hit man named Chemo, who had been the victim of a bizarre electrolysis
accident as a young man; he wound up with a complexion that had brought him
this very cruel nickname. He was also seven feet tall, so he was kind of a freakish
guy. He was in many ways a bad guy, but I had drawn him sympathetically enough,
despite all his problems, that after I finished the book I got a note from Elmore
Leonard saying, "I'm so glad you didn't kill Chemo off. He's my favorite."
I still have readers asking if I'm going to bring him back. He was a homicidal
lunatic, but they'd attached themselves to him.
Dave: A sympathetic, despicable, homicidal lunatic.
Hiaasen: The good guys all have flaws that are in some cases fairly
serious, and the bad guys all have some sort of reason for why they are what
they are. Skinny Dip
opens with Chaz throwing his wife off a cruise ship. You're horrified. Part
of you wants him to die on the spot. But then there's a curiosity, and I hope
that's what drives the plot. What made him do it? Who is he? Hopefully,
by the end of the book you understand him a little bit. You don't like him,
but there are human moments.
If you work as a reporter long enough and you end up sitting in a prison cell
listening to someone tell his story, it will dawn on you that he's in this situation
for committing a truly gruesome and heinous act, and yet you're having a fairly
normal conversation, as if you were sitting with him in Starbucks. You realize
that there are glimmers of humanity in even the most ghastly of characters.
It's important to have that if you're going to tell realistic stories.
Dave: In both Hoot
and Flush, the narrators
have to deal with bullies.
Hiaasen: I was writing from my own adolescence in those books. I was
a year younger than everybody, so I was always the smallest kid in my class,
all through high school. I had to develop a wit. I became a class clown to disarm
them with words because physically I would just get my ass pounded.
I get many hundreds of letters from kids about Hoot,
more than I've ever received about any grown-up book I've written. The environmental
elements strike a huge chord with kids. A lot of them talk about saving the
owls. That's been the most rewarding part of trying these young adult novels:
they all dig it, they're all right on board. There's no ambiguity about property
rights or any kid asking, "Why can't he build this?" It's not right to wreck
everything we get our hands on.
But the second thing that occurs in a lot of letters is that these kids will
share their experience with bullies. It's touching and heartrending, but they
send me book reports that talk about something that happened to them, paragraphs
and paragraphs about a kid that terrifies them. It seems to be some sort of
universal experience. It just comes out with kids. They connect.
Dave: Tell me about stumbling upon Christopher
Paolini's self-published novel. And are you getting a cut of his earnings?
Hiaasen: It's a great story, and he's a great kid.
My family and I go to Montana a lot in the summer. Ryan, my stepson, must
have been about ten or eleven. At that age, in the summertime, he just wanted
to play, but my wife would make him read. We were in an Albertsons, and she
picked a book off a stack. She said, "Ryan, wouldn't this be interesting?" "Oh,
no," he says. "I don't want to read that. It's about a dragon or something."
But we end up in a little bookstore in downtown Livingston, and there it is
again. She says, "Look at this. It's self-published, but the kid did all the
artwork himself." She says, "You're going to read this," and she gives it to
him.
Next thing, we're driving for about two hours and I don't hear a peep from
him. He's got his head buried in this book. He said, "Dad, it's better than
Harry Potter."
I'm not a big science fiction or fantasy guy, and I never was when I was a
kid, but I could see that this writer had a load of talent. He was sixteen when
he wrote it. When I got back home, I called my editor at Knopf, Nancy Siscoe,
and I said, "Would you be interested in taking a look at this book? I don't
know anything about him, but Ryan burned through it in no time and said it was
one of the best kids' books he's ever read."
Next thing you know, here it is. Christopher's a terrific kid, and a hard
worker—he writes like a fiend. All this success has not changed his life
at all. He's still with his family in Montana. One thing they've done, he told
me, is he now has his own room to write in.
Dave: He's earned it.
Hiaasen: I'd say so.
Dave: Just before Eragon
was published, I had Paolini on the phone from Montana, patched together with
Tamora Pierce in New
York and Philip Pullman
in Oxford. He was very excited.
Hiaasen: Pullman is one of his great heroes.
Dave: That was clear.
Hiaasen: And now they're doing a movie of Eragon; I think Malkovich
is in it. They're filming in Bulgaria or somewhere like that. When those things
happen to someone who's worked hard, it's such a great thing.
Dave: You have a couple big adaptations on the way, yourself.
Hiaasen: They just finished shooting Hoot.
Wil Shriner,
a very talented, funny guy, is directing it. He worked out the script. They
kept me in the loop. Every big script change he would talk to me. I felt like
I was part of it. I'd write notes in the margins, some of which they'd use and
some of which they didn't, but they really made an effort to stay close to the
novel. Now they're going into postproduction, going back to Hollywood, and God
only knows what will happen there, but I know that he and Jimmy
Buffett, who's producing it, really went out of their way to make the movie
like the story in the book.
I hope it works. It was such a good feeling on the set. The kids were good
actors. Luke
Wilson is in it, and Tim
Blake Nelson had some hilarious scenes. When they put it all together, who
knows? I'm not a moviemaker, but I like to think it's a movie kids would dig.
Skinny Dip is supposed
to start filming in April, I think. With Mike
Nichols, I'm just staying out of the way. Whatever you want. It sounds
corny, but I remember sitting with my dad watching Mike Nichols and Elaine
May on variety shows when they were doing stand up improv. And they were
phenomenal. They were geniuses. I read an interview where Woody
Allen said, "What I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to write for Mike
Nichols and Elaine May."
I spent two days in New York with Nichols—and Elaine is writing the
script. They invited me. They said, "We want you to come. We're just going to
brainstorm ideas. We know it has to change from the book. We have to condense
it." So I sat in their office for two days with ideas going back and forth,
and I have to tell you it was surreal. I thought I was in a dream. They're funny,
and they're so sharp. It was one of those things: I can't believe I'm sitting
here with these two.
But you keep your fingers crossed. Hollywood is Hollywood. At least in Nichols's
case, he gets final cut in all his movies, so you can mow through some off the
BS that you deal with. Some of the notes we were getting on Hoot
—oh, my God, these boneheads. There were several times when I said, "I'm
going to get on a plane and go to California, and I'm going to find this person.
I have some friends that I'm going to bring and we're going to get this straightened
out because this just can't be happening." They would calm me down. I was so
furious.
My only other experience was Strip
Tease, which I had sold on the basis, basically, that I loved The
Freshman. Marlon
Brando was in that with Matthew
Broderick. I thought it was funny as hell. Andy
Bergman wrote a great first draft [of Strip Tease], but things start
happening, you get big, big stars on there, and things change. Everyone was
wonderfully nice to me, but the ending in particular wasn't much like the book
and there were a lot of funny scenes that didn't get included. But I had nothing
to do with it.
Dave: If a fan of your work is looking to branch out, who else should
they read?
Hiaasen: I don't know how to answer that because I'm going to be comparing
myself with someone who's probably a better writer than I am.
Dave: Okay. Who do you want to share a bedside table with?
Hiaasen: I'll tell you who I like and always have liked a great deal: Tom
McGuane is a friend of mine, but I also think he's a brilliant writer. And
Jim
Harrison.
Martin Amis, I think
is amazing. I know he's controversial, but I'm reading The
Information now, and I can't go two or three paragraphs without either laughing
or getting dazzled by a sentence. I'm thinking, If I live to be a hundred-fifty,
I'm never going to write a sentence like that. In a way, this is not a good
thing for me to be reading while I'm in the middle of a novel. It ends up depressing
you. It's that Woody Allen angst. What am I doing? I'm such a phony.
But I enjoy Martin Amis quite a bit.
Elmore
Leonard has always been a favorite. I'm a huge fan of Tony
Hillerman. But for funny stuff, Donald
Westlake and Larry
Block are very funny guys and good, good writers. In my view, they're vastly
underrated. They're often described as genre writers, but they're often writing
very sharp satire. I like those guys quite a bit.
Dave: I saw in a magazine profile that you've twice won the Bonefishing
World Championship? Pardon my ignorance, but what is bonefishing?
Hiaasen: Bonefishing is a very esoteric sport-fishing that we do down
in the Keys. It's a species of fish that you don't eat; it's catch and release.
You stalk them in very shallow draft boats. You pull the boats; you don't use
an engine because the fish are so spooky. In the tournament you're referring to,
it's all-tackle; I use a spinning rod, a fly rod, whatever. I've been fishing
it for a few years, and I was lucky enough to win twice. I've won the fly tournament
a couple times, as well.
What drew me to it as a kid was that it's very peaceful. You're out in the
shallowest, calmest part of the Florida Bay or even on the ocean side out in
the Keys. You may not see any in a whole day or you may see lots, but if you
catch just one you've had a good day.
It's the experience of being out there. All the wildlife is around you: there
are stingrays and there are sharks. The experience is what drew me to it, the
solitude. Now, at the end of the day, I get in the boat for an hour or two and
pole around in the flats. It clears your brain. You can watch the
sun go down, and if you catch a fish that's great; if you don't, you're still
a hell of a lot better than you are sitting in traffic on the interstate, commuting.
It's a peculiar sport, though. I'll give you that.
Dave: Years ago, my grandmother retired in Delray Beach. Where do Floridians
retire?
Hiaasen: You know where I think they're retiring? North Carolina. I'm
not lying to you. I've talked to so many people that are buying homes in North
Carolina. And I know from people who live in North Carolina that there's a building
resentment about all these damn Floridians moving in, the same way that people
in Montana and Oregon feel about Californians sometimes.
It's cooler. It's not as crowded. The scenery is beautiful. They've had their
fill of the beach. I was born in Fort Lauderdale; I do love being out on the
water, but I can only take so much of the beach, myself.
A good friend of mine is a fishing guide, and he's saving up money to buy
a house in North Carolina. I said, "What are you going to do there? There's
no fish. There's no tarpon, no bonefish." He said, "I know, but it's nice and
quiet up there."
Bad news for North Carolina, but a lot of Floridians are heading up.
Carl Hiaasen visited Powells.com on September 29, 2005.
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