... by the evidence of the scabrous and unrelentingly hilarious Squeeze Me, the Trump era is truly Carl Hiaasen’s moment ... 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 pro-Biden readers to view this not as pessimism on Hiaasen’s part but simply as some additional deeply mordant humor. Just dive in and have a wonderful time ... Hiaasen can always be relied on to give readers a likable, decent-hearted, beset young female protagonist to fight for justice, and Angie Armstrong is great fun to follow around ... 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.
... offers both an absurdist view of tomorrow’s headlines and a welcome reprise of the outrageously surrealistic tropes that first established the author as the Hieronymus Bosch of crime fiction ... The plot gets crazier from there in a manner that we might once have seen as exaggerated for effect but that, today, sounds like a White House presser. Among the many pleasures in this rampagingly funny satire is the reappearance of one of Hiaasen’s much-loved characters, the wily Skink, former Florida governor turned Everglades hermit, who joins forces with Angie and Mastodon’s fed-up wife, Mockingbird, to inject a dash of hope into the Boschian landscape.
Novelists, like the rest of us, can’t look away from the Trump administration. Unfortunately, they haven’t found much interesting to say about it. Carl Hiaasen’s thriller Squeeze Me is, blessedly, an exception. While the best Trump fiction has dialed up the absurdity to speculative extremes, Hiaasen is clear-eyed: He meets the president on his subterranean level ... placing our absurd president in an equally absurd setting normalizes Trump in useful ways: He becomes a product of a distinctly American environment. Hiaasen’s own fondness for vulgarity—'nut sack' appears roughly once every 100 pages, a variant of “fuck” every three—diminishes the usual gap between more highbrow novelists and the president ... funny, but as with Hiaasen’s best work, it’s grounded in genuine outrage over the corruption that increasingly defines American political and cultural life. And it turns out there’s no better place to invoke that outrage than the wealthy swamps of Florida.
If you are wearing a MAGA anything, you won’t like this book...But if you could use some wild escapism right now, Hiaasen is your guy. In its themes and its wild imagination, Squeeze Me offers some familiar pleasures, akin to a Greatest Hits collection. Anyone who’s read him will know what a prime recommendation that is ... Hiaasen has always been a genial satirist, but Squeeze Me shows he can also be plenty tough when it counts.
... the sense of reality never evaporates from Squeeze Me ... may be Hiaasen’s most political novel, and, yet, in many ways it is not. Yes, it does involve the United States president who has a massive home in Palm Beach where he and his wife spend a lot of time. But Hiaasen includes a lot of differences between fiction and reality, concentrating more on Florida’s foibles. And never once do we know the president’s party affiliation ... vintage Hiaasen — wry humor, social commentary and satire akin to Jonathan Swift, and all fun.
... riotously funny ... This time, he proves there’s plenty of weirdness to be found even in 'gilded, fussy Palm Beach' ... If you’re a longtime Hiaasen fan, you might smell the roadkill-tinged aroma of his longest-running and most beloved character, a former Florida governor turned 'vagabond saboteur' called Skink ... raucous.
... amid the uninhibited political satire, notably a thinly veiled portrait of a presidential couple code-named Mastodon and Mockingbird by the secret service, there are enough murders, cover-ups and serpentine twists to keep you rooting for the novel’s spirited heroine, animal handler Angie Armstrong. Just don’t expect it to be bedside reading in the White House.
A frothy blend of murder mystery and political satire ... One mystery leads to another, and delightful subplots multiply as the sprightly narrative follows the intersecting adventures of Angie, the novel’s irresistible heroine; the first lady; bumbling villains; sardonic lawmen; loathsome politicians; and, inevitably, an Everglades-dwelling, LSD–imbibing eco-avenger—who is incubating an iguana egg in his one empty eye socket. So, yes, the humor gets wild and the satire a little outlandish. But this airy novel, taking pratfalls in stride, never loses its buoyancy thanks to Hiaasen’s deftly drawn characters and zingy dialogue ... This exuberant elegy for Florida's paved-over paradise performs the near miracle of making us laugh even as we despair.
