FEVER BEACH, by Carl Hiaasen
The greater Miami area runs roughly 120 overdeveloped miles from Jupiter down to Homestead, but spans less than 30 at its widest point. This peninsula within a peninsula can claim its share of contemporary novelists, including Karen Russell, Tananarive Due, Jennine Capó Crucet and, for whatever it’s worth, yours truly, but it is perhaps best known for its proud tradition of crime writers: Charles Willeford, John D. MacDonald, Les Standiford, Edna Buchanan, Jeff Lindsay and Carl Hiaasen, whose scabrous, irascible, best-selling capers include “Strip Tease,” “Bad Monkey” and “Razor Girl.”
“Fever Beach,” Hiaasen’s latest, is set in the (fictional) coastal hamlet of Tangelo Shores, which as near as I can tell is somewhere on the Space Coast — a few hours north of his usual stomping grounds, which may explain the surprisingly scanty and generic scene-setting by a writer whose Florida bona fides ought to be beyond question.
The first character we meet is Dale Figgo, a hapless white nationalist kicked out of the Proud Boys after a viral video shows him smearing dog feces on a statue of James Zachariah George, a Confederate general, during the Jan. 6 insurrection. It was an innocent mistake insofar as he thought he was defacing a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, but just as well: The Boys’ strict anti-masturbation policy had always (you might say) rubbed him the wrong way. Figgo, who works for a sex toy distributor, starts his own hate group, the Strokerz for Liberty, boosting product from the company warehouse to give as welcome gifts to new members. These details fairly represent the height of the novel’s stakes as well as its brow.
It’s fitting that a book dedicated to the memory of Jimmy Buffett would feature a cast of colorful weirdos and ne’er-do-wells working together (wittingly or otherwise) in a Floridian farce. Figgo’s wingman, Jonas Onus, dyes his beard the colors of the American flag and has a dog named Himmler. Figgo’s tenant, Viva Morales, is a Hispanic woman with progressive politics emblematized by her New Yorker subscription.
Viva works for Claude and Electra Mink, geriatric alcoholic philanthropists who are bankrolling a corrupt politician named Clure Boyette — an apparent caricature of Matt Gaetz, though somewhat tame by comparison — who is trying to steal an election, pay off an underage prostitute named Galaxy and seduce Viva. I hardly have the space to mention Boyette’s father, Figgo’s mother, the sensitive hit man, the rest of the Strokerz, the hit-and-run victim or the Russians.
Boyette has sold the Minks on a right-wing version of Habitat for Humanity staffed by child construction workers. It’s a funny bit, but as with Boyette himself, the satire arrives pre-obsolesced by a reality even stupider and more depraved than the author dared imagine: The Florida Legislature recently considered a bill to legalize child labor to replace the holes in the work force left by waves of deportation.
At the end of the day, Boyette doesn’t care about getting houses built by and for underprivileged children. He is funneling the Minks’ money to the Strokerz, who will serve as his foot soldiers in a voter-intimidation scheme. Unfortunately, the Strokerz have been compromised. Not, as they fear, by the feds — who, under the current administration, are more likely to deputize than arrest them — but by Twilly Spree, a wealthy environmentalist with rage issues who becomes romantically involved with Viva.
Heavily plotted but peppily paced, bursting with quips and blazing with anger, “Fever Beach” is indeed both feverish and beachy: a bottomless margarita served in a “Mueller, She Wrote” mug. There are a number of humorous set pieces, not least the Strokerz’ road trip to Key West, where an attempt to disrupt a drag show ends in well-deserved humiliation. That said, the novel’s inclination to demean and degrade all too often smacks of the very same politics of cruelty that it’s denouncing.
Though framed as antagonists, Spree, whom you might recall as the trust-fund terrorist in Hiaasen’s “Sick Puppy” (2000), and Boyette actually have a lot in common. They’re both manipulative egotists who think their unearned fortunes mean the rules of society don’t apply to them. I kept expecting this parallel to come to something — maybe a commentary on the spiritually and socially corrosive effects of wealth itself — but in the absence of a character who subscribes to, say, The Nation or n+1, the corollary is never acknowledged, let alone interrogated.
Notwithstanding the fact that the first plank of their party platform calls for my murder (for being a Jew or leftist, take your pick), I found myself falling into perverse sympathy with the Strokerz, who are despised as much by their patrons as by their enemies, and portrayed as such oafish losers — indeed, such schlemiels — they fail to register even glancingly as a threat.
One running joke is that guys like Figgo and Onus are addicted to the idea of themselves as perpetual victims, and thus must come up with increasingly absurd, bigoted self-deceptions to fuel that fantasy. No argument here. But how hard are we supposed to laugh at this jab when it’s thrown for the 10th time — especially given that Hiaasen’s brand of “Daily Show” Calvinism means that the novel really is rigged against its born-damned MAGA bubbas?
One never wonders whether they’ll get their comeuppance, only what forms it will take and how debasing it will be (respectively: many, very), and so “Fever Beach” becomes finally a test of the reader’s own appetite for sanctimony and schadenfreude. As with the bottomless margarita, you’ll have to decide for yourself when enough is enough.
FEVER BEACH | By Carl Hiaasen | Knopf | 368 pp. | $30
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