Sick Puppy
I haven't been able to read Sick Puppy yet
Review by Faith Gay: As my mom always says, the truth hurts. If you read Sick Puppy, Carl Hiaasen's latest novel, you'll understand just what she means. Hiaasen once again uses well-aimed, barbed humor to advance his ongoing crusade, the reclamation of Florida as a natural paradise. Each time he exposes the ``truth'' about the crooked politicians, lobbyists and real estate developers who are ruining the state, his villains, as mom says, get hurt or, better yet, inventively killed. After many years as a Herald reporter and columnist unceasingly excavating the landfills of South Florida's corruption, Hiaasen has earned the sweet revenge of doling out nasty comeuppance to such jerks, albeit fictional ones. In this new allegory (even the characters have allegorical names), Twilly Spree, a black-sheep millionaire and environmentalist with ``anger management'' problems, finds himself nose-to-nose with bloated, bleating Palmer Stoat, amoral lobbyist and litterbug extraordinaire. When Palmer pitches a trail of fast-food debris on the Florida Turnpike and then brokers a greasy deal to develop (read destroy) pristine Toad Island, Twilly, ``an unemployed twenty-six-year-old college dropout with a brief but spectacular history of psychological problems,'' seeks revenge. He kidnaps Boodle, Palmer's prized black lab. Since the big dog needs special medicine -- and because he is the most agreeable creature in these pages -- Stoat's mildly addled and agreeably curvaceous young wife, Desiderata, soon becomes Twilly's accessory, in every sense of the word. Ex-governor and roadkill gourmet Clinton ``Skink'' Tyree, a renegade hero in previous Hiaasen novels, reappears when Twilly is stalked by a deranged assassin hired by Robert Clapley, the island's developer. As usual, Hiaasen's characters do not evoke Norman Rockwellian images. Take, for example, the perverted Clapley. With his sexual prowess buoyed by a potion of rhino-horn dust, the developer indulges a Barbie doll fetish with a pair of surgically enhanced foreign models who resemble the famous Mattel toys: ``The statuesque immigrants represented . . . the transcendence of appetites from toy to flesh, from Barbie worship to Barbie carnality. In other words: from boy to man.'' If that notion doesn't make your palms sweat, Clapley's stale-smelling hit man, Gash, gets psyched for work by listening to purloined 911 tapes on which real victims gasp and moan for mercy as they fall out of airplanes, catch on fire or have their sex organs gouged. Gash even redubs his favorite tapes ``and set[s] them to classical music -- Mahler for domestic disputes, Tchaikovsky for cardiac arrests, and so on.'' Other featured players include a Republican hooker with a weakness for President Bush (``I would've done him for free just to say thanks, Mr. Commander in Chief, for the Gulf War'') and a ``tame, fat, half-senile'' rhino masquerading as wild game (``a regular killing machine'') for well-to-do, lazy hunters at ``Wilderness Veldt Plantation'' four hours up the turnpike from Fort Lauderdale. Now that we've suffered through Whitewater and Waco, Hiaasen's stable of miscreants seems less and less surreal. Or perhaps his villains and sickos have just become overly familiar, because we've been through their stories before. In fact, Sick Puppy could have been titled Stormy Weather II. But rest easy. Hiaasen delivers everything his fans want. He's still funny as hell and mad as hell; his myriad plot twists won't give you a moment's peace, and his characters are kinkier than anything you could order on late night TV. The problem -- if you can call it that -- with all this manic stimuli is that you're left with little more than a wicked smile and a vague sense of justice in your heart. Hiaasen is so jaded and focused that he seldom goes off-message, and though he is expert at social satire disguised as comic escapism, it might be time for him to use his big brain and seething passion to move beyond the cartoon punch of cynicism. Faith Gay is a lawyer in New York City.
Carl Hiaasen: Sick Puppy