'The afternoon of September first, dishwater-gray and rainy, a man named Dale Figgo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangelo Shores, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figgo of Danny DeVito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figgo said he’d take him there after finishing an errand.'
Thus begins Fever Beach, with an errand that leads into the depths of Florida at its most Floridian: a sun-soaked bastion of right-wing extremism, white power, greed, and corruption.
Figgo is a taxidermic creation so stuffed full of hilarious vulgarities and humiliating terrors that he might at any moment rip open along his seams. Against Hiaasen’s satiric assault, he has neither a clue nor a chance ... Fever Beach is as subtle as a falling coconut, but so are the times we live in ... Utterly ridiculous and deeply satisfying ... Admittedly, Fever Beach feels about 100 pages too long ... Without in any way diminishing the seriousness of the threats we’re facing or the difficulty of restoring moral and political order to the United States, humor remains a powerful weapon to pierce the armor of tyrants and raise the spirits of patriots. For all his silliness, Hiaasen is working in a grand tradition that stretches back to Mikhail Bulgakov satirizing Stalinism and Charlie Chaplin mocking Hitler. At his best, he can pack a paragraph with so many little parodic bangs that it feels like a fireworks display, when the explosions come so fast you stop saying 'Ahhh' and just stand in slack-jawed bedazzlement.
No satirist arrived at our dystopian moment better prepared than Carl Hiaasen. The bad guys in Hiaasen’s books have always been dangerous and mockable. These days they’re more dangerous than ever, and an infuriated Hiaasen mocks them just as viciously as they deserve—punishes them in ways that, thus far, the real world has been unable to do ... Fever Beach is among Hiaasen’s best novels, because it faces the horrors of our stupid times and portrays them in all their grotesquerie ... As I watched Hiaasen pile indignity upon indignity upon these hideous monsters’ heads, I could not stop laughing ... Hiaasen has surveyed the entire right-wing ecosystem of Florida—and thus of America—and discovered that the new ruling class make for excellent additions to his roster of grotesques ... He might be the only writer mean enough, and funny enough, to chronicle what’s happening to us all.
There is a serious story to be told about right-wing conspiracists, corrupt politicians, and shady philanthropists, and Hiaasen is sort of telling that story, but mostly he’s making us laugh—and not polite little giggles, either. We’re talking giant belly laughs, embarrass-yourself-in-public spleen-busters. This could be his funniest book yet.
