In a you-can’t-make-this-stuffup age, Carl Hiaasen sure can
Nearly all of the dozens of Carl Hiaasen’s hugely popular satirical novels, young people’s stories, nonfiction books and column collections — mainly about political corruption and environmental despoliation in the state of Florida — have been too believably, even depressingly topical. But by the evidence of the scabrous and unrelentingly hilarious “Squeeze Me,” the Trump era is truly Carl Hiaasen’s moment.
It’s as if Mastodon, as he is known here only by his Secret Service code name, actually had been hatched in Hiaasen’s febrile brain as one of his most farcically outlandish characters, and then in some “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”-like transmogrification, President Donald Trump turned up in real life — and now he is back in Hiaasen’s novel.
(The POTUS here loves the Mastodon moniker and asks an agent to be taken to the zoo so he can see a real one.)
One unnerving aspect of “Squeeze Me” is that it’s set in post-pandemic Palm Beach and Trump is still president.
It will be useful for any proBiden readers to view this not as pessimism on Hiaasen’s part but simply as deeply mordant humor. Just dive in and have a wonderful time.
Lampooning the rich is a longtime American literary pastime, and no writer has ever been blessed with more fertile territory in that regard than Palm Beach.
On the very first page we meet Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, of the “aerosol Pews” and one of the Trump-loving “Potussies,” a bevy of hard-drinking, bejeweled heiresses who, at a ball in POTUS’s honor, serenade him with a song they made up, “Big Unimpeachable You.”
Poor Kiki misses that event, however, because by then she has fallen tipsily into a pond during the Irritable Bowel Syndrome gala at Limpid House and been devoured by a 20-foot Burmese python.
(Tens of thousands of these Asian creatures are actually on the loose in the Everglades, a result of the exotic-pet craze in the 1980s and ’90s. They normally eat only smaller mammals, but apparently Kiki was too tempting to pass up.)
There’s a coverup, of course — bad for Palm Beach’s image — that eliminates the snake from the
public scenario and has Kiki instead done in by a “terrorist,” an unlucky wrong-place/wrong-time Honduran asylum-seeker named Diego Beltran. Egged on by Mastodon, mobs outside his jail cell scream, “No more Diegos! No more Diegos!” Diego has become Mastodon’s “brown-skinned Fiend-ofthe-Month.”
It’s the one aspect of the novel that’s not all that funny.
Hiaasen can be relied upon always to give readers a likable, decent-hearted, beset young female protagonist to fight for justice, and Angie Armstrong is great fun to follow around.
A former park ranger who did jail time for assaulting a poacher, Angie runs a business called Discreet Captures, ridding homes and businesses of overdeveloped Florida’s many animal intruders.
Angie is called in to deal with the original python as well as others that start turning up.
Having figured out what’s really going on, Angie must obtain — and eventually coerce — the assistance of, among others, an honest local cop, the Secret Service and the first lady of the United States. Code-named Mockingbird, Mastodon’s spouse is sympathetically portrayed here.
She finds pleasant distraction from her tedious duties and her ghastly husband in a raucous affair with a Secret Service agent named Keith Josephson.
His real name is Ahmet Youssef; in passing, the clueless POTUS compliments his wife’s lover on the agent’s “nice tan.”
Hiaasen’s narrative wanders around a bit randomly, but with all the lovingly biting detail there isn’t a page here that flags.
Even the Palm Beach hi-so names are choice, like the section in Gatsby where the long list of his party guests is so funny and revealing.
Kiki’s best friend is Fay Alex Riptoad of the “compost and iron
“Kiki Pew was seventy-two years old and, like most of her friends, twice widowed and wealthy beyond a need for calculation. With a check for fifty thousand dollars she had purchased a Diamond Patrons table at the annual White Ibis Ball. The event was the marquee fundraiser for the Gold Coast chapter of the IBS Wellness Foundation, a group globally committed to defeating Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
“Mrs. Fitzsimmons had no personal experience with intestinal mayhem but she loved a good party. A fixture on the winter social circuit, she stood barely five feet tall and weighed eighty-eight pounds sopping wet.
Her gowns were designed on Worth Avenue, her hair-and-makeup was done on Ocean Boulevard, and her show diamonds were cut on West 47th Street in Manhattan.
“Kiki Pew’s guests at the White
Ibis Ball were three other widows, a pallid set of roommate bachelors and one married couple, the McMarmots, whose clingy devotion after four decades of marriage was almost unbearable to observe. Kiki Pew spent little time at her table; a zealous mingler, she was also susceptible to Restless Legs Syndrome, another third-tier affliction with its own well-attended charity ball.”w ore Riptoads.”
Then there are the McMarmots, Tripp Teabull, Yirma Skyy Frick of the personal-lubricant Fricks, and Kiki’s stepsons, Chase and Chance Cornbright.
Mastodon’s mansion/private club is Casa Bellicosa.
Among the upcoming charity events threatened by the python scourge are the Psoriatic Gingivitis Gala and the Peyronie’s Syndrome Ball. Everybody’s artificially bronzed and cantilevered, and a crucial you-see-it-coming-andcan’t-wait plot point involves POTUS’s malfunctioning tanning bed.
Hiaasen’s old reliable deus ex machina character, much beloved by his fans — former Florida Gov. Clinton “Skink” Tyree — even shows up to help Angie provide Mastodon with a dose of his own bad medicine.
The crazy-sane environmentalist emerges from the swamps where he resides among the snakes and shows Angie the baby iguana recently hatched from an egg he incubated in his empty eye socket. That’s a joke, but is it any grosser or daffier than what the nation now witnesses daily on cable news?
— EXCERPT, “SQUEEZE ME” BY CARL HIAASEN