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Fiction

In Carl Hiaasen’s New Novel, Crazy Things Keep Happening

Carl HiaasenCredit...Quinn Hiaasen

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RAZOR GIRL
By Carl Hiaasen
333 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

In Florida it’s usually too hot to move very fast, but Carl Hiaasen, a native son of the Sunshine State, likes to hit the ground running. His previous novel, “Bad Monkey,” begins with a fisherman reeling in a severed arm with its middle finger “rigidly extended.” The opening scene of his new one, “Razor Girl,” describes an equally improbable and intriguing happening — which, Hiaasen assures us in an author’s note, is based on “true events in South Florida.” A slick Hollywood agent, driving from Miami to Key West, is rear-ended by an attractive redhead who, he is surprised to see, was in the act of shaving her, um, “bikini area” at the time of the collision. Dazed by the spectacle, he agrees to give her a ride in his lightly damaged rental car, and a few miles on, she and a waiting confederate kidnap him. True events? South Florida, remember.

Hiaasen’s openings hit you like the first blast of hot, sticky air on a Florida morning. They knock you sideways, and it can take a while to get your bearings. Pretty soon, though, you start to realize that the heat, and the craziness it induces, just ­aren’t going to let up, so you might as well go with it.

Within a few pages of “Razor Girl,” we learn that the abducted agent, Lane Coolman, is in Florida to accompany his most important client — Buck Nance, the star of a “Duck Dynasty”-like reality show called “Bayou Brethren” — to an appearance in Key West, which, in the agent’s absence, winds up not going particularly well. Without his handler, Buck panics at the microphone and begins to tell what he thinks of as surefire jokes: One is racist; another (in Key West, mind) is jaw-droppingly homophobic. The crowd turns ugly, and Buck takes it on the lam, hastily disguising himself by shaving off his long patriarchal beard.

The hair ends up in a vat of quinoa in a popular local restaurant, occasioning a call to one Andrew Yancy, who was also the hero of “Bad Monkey”: an ex-cop, busted down to health inspector after a public altercation with his mistress’s husband. (There was, Yancy admits, “a proctological aspect” to the encounter.) Here, as in the previous book, he wants two things in life above all: to get his old job back and to prevent the construction of any house on the lot adjoining his home on Big Pine Key that might obstruct his glorious view of the ocean.

We learn, too, that the kidnapping of Lane Coolman was a case of mistaken identity. The intended victim was a scuzzy entrepreneur named Martin Trebeaux, who runs a “beach renourishment” business called Sedimental Journeys. The idea is to replace the sand on Florida’s constantly beleaguered coastline, but Trebeaux is prone to cutting corners. And when he renourishes the beach of the Royal Pyrenees Hotel and Resort with a substance that “more closely resembles shrapnel than sugar granules,” he runs afoul of the establishment’s owner, a mob capo named Dominick (Big Noogie) Aeola, who orders him snatched.

We are also, around this time, getting to know Yancy’s prospective next-door neighbors, a ditsy shopaholic named Deb and her fiancé, Brock, an attorney specializing, Deb says, in “product liability, pharmaceuticals mainly.” This paragon of the legal profession is currently working on a class-action suit against the manufacturers of Pitrolux, “a deodorant armpit gel that also boosted testosterone.” Hiaasen describes the deficiencies of this product eloquently: “The target market segment was middle-aged men with slack penises and gagging body odor, but the refreshing juniper scent had attracted teenage girls who failed to read the warning label while rifling their parents’ medicine cabinets. Among the jarring side effects of Pitrolux were volcanic acne, yam-sized larynxes and goatees as lush as any in the N.B.A.”

The agent, meanwhile, is finding himself strangely drawn to the “red-haired pube shaver,” who goes by the (probably false) name Merry Mansfield. He wrestles, as agents will, with ethical questions: “Would it be wrong to seduce your own kidnapper? Coolman wondered. Not after all the grief she’d caused him. She was probably a sociopath, but so were half the women” he bedded in Hollywood.

All this is happening even before we’ve been properly introduced to various other important characters, such as Benny (Blister) Krill, a small-time crook and big-time “Bayou Brethren” fan who is, if anything, stupider and meaner than his hero, Buck Nance. Also making a somewhat delayed entrance are the giant Gambian pouched rats, which Hiaasen, in his author’s note, disclaims the credit of inventing. “Those suckers are real,” he writes, in evident awe.

The farce machinery of Hiaasen’s fiction is, as always, fearsomely elaborate, and a good part of the pleasure of “Razor Girl” is in the casual, no-sweat way he sets it all up. Once it’s in motion, things happen fast, new people (and animals) keep turning up to play their parts in the comedy, and the whole complicated apparatus gives off a soothing hum, like a smooth-running motor on a fishing boat. You’d think the engine would overheat, but somehow it never does; it doesn’t even sputter. The secret is Hiaasen’s premium, high-grade comic prose, which keeps everything at the right temperature. In Florida, you have to know how to stay cool.

Hiaasen’s dry, air-conditioned style is so understated and precise that it seems, at times, practically British. Consider, for instance, this elegant sentence: “Most of the night log was routine Key West turpitude — drunken fistfights, inept dope deals, a handful of auto burglaries, one halfhearted domestic assault (the husband was struck with a bag of frozen snapper chum) and seven unsolved ­cases of public urination.” You laugh first at the use of the old-fashioned, churchy-­sounding word “turpitude” in this grubby context, then at the cunningly deployed adjectives “inept” and “halfhearted,” and finally at the brilliant “unsolved,” which opens up wide vistas of law-­enforcement futility. This is a sentence that might have been written by Kingsley Amis, Michael Frayn or even P.G. Wodehouse — except, of course, for the actual content, which is as American as a bag of frozen snapper chum.

And besides, what drives the action in an English-style farce is generally the characters’ fear of embarrassment or shame, a couple of feelings we Yanks put in the rearview mirror quite a while ago. Physical humiliation, however, remains a lively possibility, as several of Hiaasen’s people discover: “The old Bahia Honda Bridge was chosen for its altitude, scenic vista and lack of bystanders. . . . Trebeaux was gagged with his tartan boxer shorts and dangled naked except for the surgical hemostats still clamped to his scrotum.” And then, with hilarious lyricism, Hiaasen adds, “Their polished steel reflected a soft salmon glow from the sunset sky.”

The stressed-out folks in “Razor Girl” are afraid not of social opprobrium but of rather more elemental stuff: bad food, bad sex, lack of money, leaky boats, senseless violence and the wrath of varmints, human and otherwise. Hiaasen’s trick is to cool all these steamy dreads and yearnings with refreshing breezes of sharp, clear language. By the end of this complicated story, some of his characters get what they want, many do not, an unfortunate few get what they deserve, and the great state of Florida remains just as it was, implacably weird. But, thanks to Carl Hiaasen, it feels kind of renourished. Just watch out for the shrapnel underfoot.

Terrence Rafferty, the author of “The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies,” is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Heat Made Them Do It. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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