Nothing is Natural About Nature Girl

By Rawlins McKinney January 25, 2007 Issue

Carl Hiaasen says that his books are hard to make into movies because they are narrative-based and do not translate to the screen easily. Maybe so. However, his latest effort, Nature Girl, does not depend so much on narrative as it does outrageous and outlandish and sometimes unbelievable characters.

Honey Santana must be kin to Twilly Spree, the protagonist in Sick Puppy, perhaps Hiaasen's best book. Both are obsessed with making people behave. Twilly does it by blowing up banks, torching jet skis and, best of all, dumping dung beetles into a litterbug’s Range Rover. Honey, a bipolar beauty, is not quite as violent but you sense she could be, especially when she threatens to emasculate a plumber who has done a sloppy job for her.

The target of Honey’s latest outrage is Boyd Shreave, a telemarketer who loses his cool when Honey scrambles his pitch for a Florida development with her own kookiness. In his frustration he tells her, “Go screw yourself you dried up old skank.” That's all that's needed to set Honey off on an elaborate scheme to teach the despicable Mr. Shreave a lesson. Honey’s manic personality consumes her. Agitated by the musical static in her head, her obsession enables her to track down the rude telemarketer’s home telephone number and then turn the tables on him. He takes the bait: two round-trip plane tickets for an eco-tour of Florida's Ten Thousand Islands in exchange for listening to a pitch for, you guessed it, a Florida development.

Shreave may be one of the most unattractive characters in literature. He is lazy, sleazy, self-centered and physically a klutz. He sees the tour as an opportunity to win back his mistress, Eugenie, who has just broken up with him because, as she tells him, “You’re boring… I don't care to spend the rest of my days servicing a couch potato.” Here we have a real believability stretch even for a Hiaasen novel. Eugenie is six feet of lusciousness. You wonder why she would ever have had such a loser as a sack buddy. And why in the world would the slothful Boyd even consider a strenuous kayaking tour in the aquatic boondocks of Florida?

Unknown to Boyd, his wife knows about his hanky-panky with Eugenie. She has some graphic evidence produced by a private eye she has hired. But she is not satisfied. She wants close-up pornography and offers the gumshoe a ridiculous sum of money to follow Boyd and Eugenie on their kayaking adventure. He accepts, even though he knows he is on an impossible mission.

It's about this time that you start to feel sorry for Florida's Ten Thousand Islands, specifically Dismal Key. This small island is where Honey intends to give Boyd his lesson in civility. You have to wonder whether or not it's big enough to hold the cast of Hiaasen characters that are converging upon it.

Sammy Tigertail, a half-Seminole who is somewhat lacking in outdoor skills, heads for Dismal Key to with an improbable goal of becoming a hermit. A wacko coed from FSU who slips away from a drunken beach party and demands that Sammy make her his hostage impedes his quest for solitude.

Honey and her fellow kayakers are being stalked by Piejack, owner of a fish market and Honey’s former boss. He is determined to make Honey his love slave after she pops him in his private parts with a crab mallet in retaliation for a breast grope at the fish market.

Hot on everyone's trail are probably the two closest to normal characters in the story, Honey's ex-husband, Perry Skinner, and their 12-year-old son, Fry. It's a heck of a note when a convicted drug smuggler is the novel’s sole rational adult. And he's pretty shaky at times. But hey, it's a Hiaasen tale. Despite his age, Fry is definitely the adult in this adventure. He has spent most of his young life trying to protect Honey from herself.

Further complicating this scenario of misfits-on-a-mission are the brothers and sisters of the First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God. Brother Manual and his flock are waiting on a nearby island for Jesus, whom they believe has returned and is sailing the seven seas.

The constant shifts of point of view within this gumbo of misfits sometimes muddies the already wobbly plot. It’s confusing when gunshots ring out intermittently. Are they new or have we heard them previously through the ears of another character? The action shifts from one part of the island to another and would be easier to understand if the author had included a map.

Hard-core Hiaasen fans may be disappointed in Nature Girl since it lacks the hard-hitting get-the-man punch of his other works that deal unmercifully with the villains who are spoiling Florida. All this ado just to get even with a telemarketer?

Despite its shortcomings, I think Nature Girl can be an entertaining beach read because of its oddball characters. And thanks to global warming, those of us who live in the Panhandle are having more and more opportunities to bask on the beach, even in mid-winter.

Global warming? Now that's a more appropriate subject for Hiaasen's ire. Why worry about gnats while the atmosphere is being destroyed by a worldwide corporate/political alliance of money-grubbing Grendels? Sic ‘em, Carl.

Native Girl, Alfred A. Knopf, 306 pages, available at local booksellers and libraries.

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