Chomp – Carl Hiaasen

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Hooray for Carl Hiaasen and Chomp, the latest in his Florida wilderness adventures for intrepid kids. Chomp, as you might deduce, deals with a very large and toothy alligator but the comic romp (sorry, irresistible rhyming compulsion) ranges all over the exotic flora and fauna of the Everglades and the reckless foibles of the flawed human species as well. It’s wild, in every sense of the word. And it’s fun, because Hiaasen’s children’s books are educational and hilarious and this one is no exception.

Wahoo Cray plans to change his name to something normal as soon as he hits eighteen and can do so legally. For the time being, he helps his father wrangle the menagerie of critters that live on their property at the edge of the Glades, tossing nuked whole chickens to Alice the gator, who accidentally crunched off his thumb once, and feeding pythons, monkeys, turtles and whatever else wanders into their “zoo”. Wahoo’s mom is a language teacher who flies off to China as the book opens to make some cash from tin-eared executives so the family can catch up on the mortgage and avoid foreclosure. Not much money has been coming in since dad was conked on the head by a frozen giant iguana that tumbled out of a palm tree during a cold snap.

By the time a reader digests all this madness, the arrival of a reality TV crew and a fake made-for-television survivalist and adventurer seems almost tame. Alice nearly chomps the back end off the TV star when he ignores the Cray duo’s warning about provoking her. The show then hires the two of them to guide the production into the real Everglades to encounter actual wild creatures for the star to wrestle into submission and probably roast over a counterfeit campfire. While collecting supplies for the expedition, they rescue a girl named Tuna with a major shiner in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart where she lives with her drunk, abusive father in a trailer. And then things really get interesting.

Throughout the violence–staged and real–with chopper shots, stunt doubles, razor-toothed wildlife, crashed air boats and loaded guns, Hiaasen delivers a boatload of information about indigenous and invasive species, the destructive incursion of people into a pristine wilderness, the idiocy of same species, and the wonders to be glimpsed when you venture off the beaten trails. There are good old boys—and bad old boys—greedy media types, plucky kids, deluded and well-meaning grown-ups, fortuitous and disastrous accidents and nonstop action. He even manages to sneak in a subplot about vampires, capitalizing on the current craze for the paranormal without sacrificing the fine intelligence and irony that give every incident a delicious twist.  

Hiaasen has delivered another knock-out punch. Hoot, Flush and Scat are his previous books for kids and the discriminating adults I know who have sampled them are as enamored of the formula as younger readers. May he never run out of environmental crusades to wage so we can look forward to many more one-syllable escapades in Florida’s endangered and endlessly entertaining ecosystems. Chomp is excellent. Devour it at your earliest opportunity.

Chomp    Carl Hiaasen | Alfred A. Knopf   2012

Liebestod — Leslie Epstein

Liebestod, Opera Buffa with Leib Goldkorn

Liebestod, Opera Buffa with Leib Goldkorn is Leslie Epstein’s ultimate sequel to his risible life of Leib Goldkorn, now a spry 103 and contemplating suicide in the gas oven in his rent-stabilized Upper West Side apartment. I had high hopes for the comic relief of this book—and it came with the promise of humorous treatment of much that Upper West Siders hold dear: whitefish from Barney Greengrass—check; Renee Fleming—check; Luciano and Placido in the same opera—improbable at best but check; Gustav Mahler—check; backstage at the Metropolitan Opera—check; Jimmy Levine conducting said opera—check; enough Yiddishkeit to inspire spontaneous conversion—check.

It was funny, for about fifty or so pages. But then I was over the joke and, clever as the novel is, I plowed through the rest of it. Too insider, maybe. Too much priapic rambling. Lots of current events twisted, and then twisted again, into witty pretzels of repartee. Much ink devoted to the decelerated micturations of extremely old men. Predacious landlords, scheming villagers, misguided politicians and long lost Mahler progeny in miraculous possession of an undiscovered opera by the composer–all of it filtered through the inimitable lens of Leib. Just couldn’t sustain the grins.

I think it is a wonderful book for some readers who will admire its inventiveness and willingly eschew the virtues of moderation. But they are not me. Terrorists taking over an operatic performance worked brilliantly in Bel Canto (which is not a comedy but is absolutely memorable). Not so much here. Epstein has done his prodigious research—he gets every detail of the Met exactly right. He layers on history like nova on a bagel. He maintains an original voice throughout. I was impressed by the writing but, in the end, I didn’t enjoy it.

You should try the whitefish at Barney Greengrass–Amsterdam between 86^th and 87^th—legendary. But tackle the picaresque adventures of Leib Goldkorn with care. You might love it and chuckle out loud. Or not. I was relieved when the curtain (metaphorically speaking) came down.

Liebestod: Opera Buffa with Leib Goldkorn   Leslie Epstein | W. W. Norton & Company   2012

Bunnicula – Deborah and James Howe

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The rabbit is an alfalfa and banana addict. Peel a banana anywhere in the house and, within moments, the sleeping head will rise, the nose will go into overdrive and the bunny will demand his due. Open a bag of organic alfalfa hay and World’s Most Adorable Rabbit will do the frantic dance until he can bury his head in a woven basket of the stuff and chomp away.

He is a pint-size tyrant who requires the prompt delivery of a papaya tablet every morning and will pee on the floor of his four-story custom condo—nonverbal communication–if you leave the door latched. This is because he has a second home in the bedroom, consisting of a wooden split-level dollhouse with the furniture removed. It makes a nice covered vacation cottage in which to snooze away a few happy hours and he prefers to do this when there is company in the room, although not company that tries to pick him up and cuddle him.

The rabbit is an alpha bunny, although you might not get that at first because he is all over covered in long, silky fluff that makes it difficult to tell the front from the back. Complicating the orientation issue is the fact that he is a mini-lop so his ears hang down, like the fur. And he is very very cute. Everyone who sees him, even the expensive exotic pet vet, gets all ga-ga about how pretty! and how cute! he is. He is. Cuteness is protective coloration for intransigence. He is a small inflexible dictator and we are his groupies and his slaves.

So I can relate to Bunnicula and even find it funny. It is hilarious, actually. Deborah and James Howe wrote a modern fable about a baby cotton-tailed foundling who was abandoned in a Dracula movie, adopted by a family with a literate cat, two boys, and a dog with a jones for cream-filled chocolate cupcakes. Odd things begin happening to the veggies in the fridge late at night when the tiny bunny should be locked in his cage. He isn’t. And, in the morning, all the vegetables in the kitchen have had an attack of albinism. White tomatoes. White zucchini. White lettuce.

The cat, who reads Edgar Allen Poe and The Mark of the Vampire, notes the bunny’s prominent front teeth and figures it out first. But the humans are obtuse and Harold the dog is more interested in bacon and those Hostess cupcakes. Many hare-raising (Oops. Sorry.) escapades disrupt the moonlit nights of the household. Chester the cat cannot communicate his distress and pays dearly for his inventive efforts to save the family. He is bathed–twice—and taken to the vet. The bunny prevails. But, in true bunny fashion, Bunnicula is cute. Really, endearingly cute. So we know how this story ends. Bunnies always win—it’s in their DNA. Let that be a lesson to you.

Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery   Deborah and James Howe | Aladdin   1996

Orlando – Virginia Woolf

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Orlando was a very successful self-published book for Virginia Woolf in 1928. She called it a biography but it is really a fictional exploration of the meaning of gender, a mild send-up of the formal biographical detail typically used to sum up a life, an homage to Woolf’s bisexual lover Vita Sackville-West, and a comic romp that represented a departure from her more sober novels.

The protagonist is a young nobleman, born and raised in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. During the course of the novel he is a sought after lover, first of the aging queen, then of a number of potential and actual high-born fiancées, soon of a mysterious Russian princess who captures his heart and abruptly vanishes on the morning tide. Heartbroken, he retires to his country estate where he contemplates the meaning of life, love, poetry and noble legacy on endless walks in nature. When Orlando is stalked by an archduchess who resembles a hare, and is considerably less captivating,  he finds salvation in flight.

Calling on his noble connections, he wins an appointment as foreign ambassador to Constantinople where his extraordinary physical beauty, intelligence and charm win him friends and a new title. But bloody rioting in the city disrupts his boring exile and he falls into a long sleep from which he emerges a woman. Orlando is still Orlando in everything except gender, which fazes him, um her, not a whit. She flees the burning city with a band of gypsies and lives with them until her reverence for nature and gypsy pragmatism clash and Orlando ships out for home.

On the voyage, she discovers that a glimpse of her fabled legs will nearly send a sailor plunging from the mast, and that those legs are now encased in yards of skirt which will place a real drag on her freedom. But she also reflects that she might not mind the role of woman, a yield-and-resist pattern to replace the bluster-and-conquer persona that might be expected of her as a male. She returns to the endless writing and revising of a nature poem she began as a boy and, once back in England, explores what it means to be a writer, a woman, a sexual being with a new orientation.

Orlando was a larky but daring experiment for Woolf. The novel treats bisexuality, androgyny, lesbianism, the constraints of gender throughout the history of English society—Orlando only ages twenty years in the almost 400-year course of the book—the struggles of the writer, the responsibilities of property, and complex issues of identity. It is funny, satirical, and laced with a kind of magical realism that accommodates its bizarre turns.

I needed to immerse myself in a classic after a long diet of mostly current books—probably a reader’s reaction to Downton Abbey—and before I approach one or two self-published novels by e-book millionaires, the formula for the future if literary pundits can be trusted. Woolf self-published with more prosaic technology and left a lasting legacy. Orlando isn’t a thriller and it has no trolls. But it does take risks and is very readable and we can be glad there was Hogarth Press to help it find an audience so we can still read it today.

Orlando (Annotated): A Biography   Virginia Woolf | Harcourt Brace & Company

Cold Sassy Tree – Olive Ann Burns

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Cold Sassy Tree is a turn-of the-century novel—19^th to 20^th–set in Cold Sassy, Georgia, a fictional small town named after a chilly season and the sassafras trees that once defined a settlement. All but one of the trees are gone now and the town is on the cusp of irrevocable change. “Damnyankees” is still one word but electric lights, indoor plumbing, telephones and automobiles are remaking daily life and the landscape. Blakeslee’s mercantile is transforming right along with the family and the times.

The narration is handled by 14-year-old Will Tweedy but the story is really about his grandpa, E. Rucker Blakeslee, who owns the store, supports the family and is a very progressive patriarch for 1906 in the Deep South. Grandpa Blakeslee is genuinely grief-stricken at the death of Granny Blakeslee, Mattie Lou, his beloved wife. But that doesn’t stop him from eloping with the store’s milliner, Miss Love Simpson, three weeks later. The family is horrified. The town is scandalized. Grandpa pays them no mind because he needs a housekeeper and, as he succinctly puts it when reminded that his longtime wife is newly buried, “She’s dead as she’ll ever be, ain’t she?”

Will is a lot like Grandpa, an independent cuss who almost always chooses candor over diplomacy. But the old man is crafty and clever as well and generally gets his own way. As the town fusses and flutters about the unseemly elopement, Will discovers a few things about Miss Love and his grandfather that confuse him even more. The story is fashioned like a family quilt with sections detailing siblings, spouses, nosy neighbors, rival churches, old grudges, sit-down meals, and big adventures. Will narrowly escapes death and becomes a local celebrity. He daydreams about a forbidden “mill girl,” a friend from school who lives on the wrong side of the tracks. He ducks chores, eavesdrops accidentally and on-purpose and doesn’t know how to hold the juicy information he uncovers.

Cold Sassy Tree is Will’s coming-of-age story but it’s as much the saga of his relationship with the irreverent, iconoclastic and stubborn mentor who keeps his own secrets while he manipulates the whole town. Olive Ann Burns makes thrifty use of her own early twentieth century upbringing in a small Georgia town. Her vivid descriptions of learning to drive Cold Sassy’s eye-popping first car; local characters and their personal peculiarities; the tides and torments of ruinous gossip, rivalries, and unapologetic snooping; the strict social etiquette that dictates behavior, however unkind and hypocritical; and the family loyalties that ultimately trump jealousy and vendettas are as compelling as an addictive made-for-television series.

It’s a wonderful story—funny, sad, surprising, suspenseful and memorable. Cold Sassy Tree was an instant best seller debut for sixty-year old Burns in 1984. Unhappily, she only completed part of one sequel before she died six years later.

Cold Sassy Tree   Olive Ann Burns | First Mariner Books   1984

Bridget Jones’s Diary — Helen Fielding

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When you read something topical more than a decade past its prime, you miss the frisson of excitement that greeted its debut. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding drew raves when it was first published. I had no desire to read it then—probably about 15 years ago—because I thought it celebrated women as victims, trapped in some self-critical hell they could never climb out of. Actually, that was a reasonably perceptive evaluation.

I picked up the book at our fabulous St. Agnes library, thinking I could catch up on a dated cultural icon. Then I had to force myself to finish it. Yes, the musings of the overweight, alcoholic, dateless, human chimney with no self confidence who is known as Bridget Jones were amusing at first. Self-deprecating humor and unabashed self-bashing can be funny for about 15 minutes. But unwinding the tangled skein of a life that was going nowhere in a society that didn’t blink about that was just booorrrriinng. Bridget believes in every molecule of her liver-challenged, cholesterol-threatened and nicotine-laden being that she is a complete failure without the affirmation of some man. Really. Some—any—man seems to be it for her. She pursues creeps and cads obsessively, chronicling her failures along with daily calorie counts, cigs smoked, alcohol consumed and weight gained or lost.

Where is her brain? Where is a shred of self-awareness in all the self-criticism? Where is the acknowledgement that we create our own reality and that, as Lao Tzu proclaimed millennia ago, if you continue to do the same things, you will get the same results? Were there really that many women a decade and a half ago who believed they were nothing without a man? Funny became frustrating a dozen diary entries into this book.

In the end, is the fat girl Cinderella? Does the magic of Prince Charming save her? Has she learned her extraordinary self-destructive dumbness from her mother—another woman portrayed as an idiot in the book? Oy. I couldn’t muster appreciation for Bridget’s plight and her triumph just seemed like abject failure-to-thrive to me. Critics described this self-improvement queen as self-aware. Not. Didn’t happen. Mr. Darcy rides in on his white horse to save all the women who have eff’d up their lives big time and we wonder where Elizabeth Bennet wandered off to. Jane Austen could do Pride and Prejudice and deliver a satisfying human narrative with bright, imperfect characters who evolve. Helen Fielding just delivered Lumps and Losers in an endless loop of yo-yo dieting, hangovers and clever quips. It made me tired.  

Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Novel (Penguin Ink) (The Penguin Ink Series)  

Helen Fielding  | Penguin Books  2001

Good Bones and Simple Murders — Margaret Atwood

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Good Bones and Simple Murders is a collection of Margaret Atwood’s—umm—short bits? Mini-stories? Musings on our twisted society? Whatever it is, it’s amusing, witty, brilliant as the author and, incidentally, illustrated by her, as if you weren’t already impressed with the poetry, fiction and journalism Atwood turns out, seemingly on cue.

The bits hit on many of Atwood’s themes and spare none of the comfortable clichés of literature or life. “The Female Body” explores the fragile imperfect thing a body is, a light-up see-through anatomical model, the culturally determined accessories required for the social display of the female body and, finally, that queen of accessories, the doll herself—giant boobs, teeny waist, pointy little feet, long legs, no cellulite, and bouncy vinyl hair, probably blond. What a small girl can do to a Barbie doll is a sadistic and very satisfying thing. Read all about it.

“Poppies” is a creative writing exercise–she calls it “variations”–that uses the lines from “In Flanders Fields” to inspire a series of anti-war texts. But that oversimplifies. Atwood describes history, aftermath, toy soldiers, male violence, fearful women and an arsenal’s worth of topics that circle around her point before they explode—with those words from the poem italicized in case you failed to catch the clever trick.

“Gertrude Talks Back” gives the queen some centerstage that Shakespeare never scripted. She would have called Hamlet ‘George,” thinks he ought to get himself laid and find a real girlfriend, not the bordeline Ophelia, puts the Prince of Denmark straight about sex, booze and his frigid, abstemious father. Atwood’s Gertrude is drying her nails, not wringing her hands, not the least bit angsty, entirely unapologetic. The angst he must have gotten from his father.   

In “There Was Once,” Atwood deconstructs a fairy tale with some combination of political correctness and obsessive editing until the story becomes untellable. In the title story, she deconstructs bones—the lacy bones of the old, the high cheekbones of the young and a cemetery full of good and bad bones mixed with some thoughts about calcium and mortality. In “Hardball,” she creates a horrible post-apocalyptic world where the rich live on the top deck with access to pink strawberries and pale yellow carrots. Severe shortage of real estate for agriculture, human habitation and corpse disposal but pretty good protein when a baby is born and someone is selected for the meat grinder. Is it recycling or a demented form of composting? We may soon find out.

Good Bones is very entertaining and very brainy and both fun and not-so-funny at the same time. I read it on the subway en route to a client meeting downtown. I read it on the way home, subway again. I changed trains twice going down and once coming back. It’s a good book to read on the subway. Oh, and the illustrations aren’t bad—probably better than you could do.

Good Bones and Simple Murders   Margaret Atwood   Doubleday  1994

Star Island — Carl Hiaasen

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The Miami Herald was a huge factory stuffed with talented reporters, editors and photographers when I worked there. Carl Hiaasen did some writing for the Sunday magazine, my little niche in the mammoth enterprise. Mostly I knew him as a prolific columnist, relentless reporter and slightly obsessed environmentalist. Florida’s fragile ecosystems were his passion and they still are. But it turned out the man had a streak of madness as unstoppable as the zany, whacked-out stories we all scrambled to cover in that most insane locale. Miami had cocaine cowboys shooting up shopping malls, holy virgins appearing on the trunks of trees, developers draining the Everglades and Carl jamming it all into crackpot, comic romps through murders and mayhem. I believe every one of them, and there are many by now, became a bestseller.

The allure of Hiaasen’s mysteries? satires? comedies? to me is the recognition of the characters and the events. You think they are fiction but I can tell you he hasn’t made up a thing. Skink is modeled on a real governor and South Beach happens just like he tells it and the Keys always have some dastardly, greed-driven project brewing and the hit men and the unnatural blonds and even the roadkill and the gourmet gators are a dime a dozen on the police scanners. Hiaasen has collected them all.

Star Island is a send-up of the sordid little world of pill-popping, mojito-swigging, post-pubescent celebrities, the rank paparazzi who trail them, the really vulgar stage parents who use the kids, and the perennial bad guys who turn up book-after-book trying to make a killing in real estate and killing everything for miles around while they’re doing it. Cherry Pye is the kid who didn’t: sing on her albums; have a shred of identifiable talent; stay sober for more than fifteen minutes in any given week; survive the meat grinder of fame with much of herself intact. Ann DeLusia is Cherry’s double, the blond who shows up stunning and walks straight on the red carpet and makes it into all the tabloid photos when good old Cherry is doing time in rehab or puking in her hotel room. Bang Abbott is a scumbag shooter who has a thing for Cherry, no scruples and almost no acquaintance with soap and water. A large cast of characters have a stake in Cherry’s upcoming comeback tour but Cherry has a jones for designer drugs and plenty of vodka and a third-rate actor who’s renting the house on Star Island in Biscayne Bay where some of the action takes place.

Hiaasen has packed in his usual suspects – the bodyguard with the weedwacker hand, the scam-artist developer with a scrotum full of sea urchin spines – ouch – the botoxed twin publicists who should be strategizing the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, the redoubtable Skink with his taxidermy glass eye, his scavenged dinners fresh off the highway and his mission to save the sea turtles and the scrub pines. It’s humongous fun. Things fall apart right away and then they really fall apart. Just when you thought—but no, the plot veers drunkenly in a new direction and you’re off in hot pursuit.

My favorite Hiaasen books are his kid stories – Hoot, Flush and Scat – but it’s entertaining to see the world through Skink’s eye now and again and Star Island delivers a rollicking good read with generous helpings of poetic justice, a tour bus-jacking, some fast cars – not all of them on the road – a few sharks – not all of them in the water — and an unbelievably bad and prominent tattoo. It will cheer you up.

Star Island   Carl Hiaasen | Alfred A. Knopf  2010