Up to no good in the 'Glades

Skinny Dip
By Carl Hiaasen
Knopf, 355 pp., $24.95

Carl Hiaasen's anger and humor make for an entertaining brew in "Skinny Dip," the Florida writer's latest love letter to the Everglades. Like his other novels, it bubbles over with oddball characters and affection for nature, which is sacrosanct to Hiaasen no matter how savage. We're not talking about human nature, however. Hiaasen trusts that far less.

"Skinny Dip" explores the gap between the two kinds of nature, probing the darker aspects of Florida politics, corrupt agribusiness, and the consumerist attitude that dooms so many trophy marriages. It also makes you laugh out loud.

"Skinny Dip" starts with the attempted murder of Joey Perrone, just finished celebrating year two with her husband, "science whore" Charles Regis Perrone. When they go onto the deck of a cruise liner, Chaz grabs Joey by the ankles and tosses her overboard. We enter the story underwater, in Joey's head. Bewildered, and furious with Chaz, she's determined to live; Chaz has forgotten that Joey was a champion swimmer in college. When she washes up on an island to which reclusive ex-cop Mick Stranahan has retired, she hones her vengefulness and, with his help, concocts the complicated scheme that makes the novel so absorbing.

The scheme is the main story line, but the characters provide the texture. The most engrossing is Edward Earl O'Toole, a man of great appetite, small brain, and shriveled morals. We meet him when Samuel Hammernut, the corrupt agrifarmer who hires Chaz to cover up his environmental depredation, hires Tool as a bodyguard for Chaz. Chaz has been doctoring water samples to keep Florida's conservation department from discovering how badly Hammernut is polluting the Everglades.

The huge, strikingly hairy Tool is addicted to fentanyl, a powerful opiate that relieves the pain he feels from a bullet embedded in one of his most private places. Tool gets his dope by robbing hospitals and hospices and peeling fentanyl patches off terminal cancer patients. He meets his match in Maureen, a little old lady dying in every place but her spirit. Tool finds religion, even peace, with Maureen.

Tool's self-realization is the highlight of a novel that never fails to move and entertain; Hiaasen is a master of narrative drive even in his weaker fiction. There are flaws here, too. Hiaasen doesn't flesh out Joey's character sufficiently, sentimentalizing her and Stranahan; Joey rarely seems more than perky, Stranahan rarely less than noble.

But he invests the villains with detail and color, particularly Chaz, who botches several murders, and Hammernut, who considers the Everglades a "latrine." Hiaasen also brings the Florida where 'gators spawn, mosquitoes swarm, and cattails betray excess phosphorus to vivid life.

The contrasts in Florida rankle Hiaasen, who in "Skinny Dip" speaks most directly through Corbett Wheeler, Joey's brother, who left the United States to become a big-time, ecologically sensitive shepherd in New Zealand. Corbett returns to help Joey torment Chaz. Richer than God, he rents a fleet of helicopters to buzz the mosquito-covered, profoundly paranoid Chaz as the latter drives the screaming yellow Hummer Hammernut bought him into the Everglades. The scene evokes "GoodFellas," Chaz's favorite movie, by making him feel like Ray Liotta, the gangster competitor Robert DeNiro plans to take out:

"Later, as the pilot angled northward, Joey heard her brother gag in revulsion at the sight of western Broward County, where new subdivisions were erupting like cankers in all directions. . . . Where there were no homes stood office parks, shopping plazas and enormous auto malls. . . . Only a slender dirt levee separated the clamorous tide of humanity from the Everglades."

Corbett's a pip; so is Ricca Spillman, a lover of Chaz's who, nearly too late, discovers how shallow, cold, and downright silly he is. Another key plot driver is Karl Rolvaag, a cop who seems to have stepped out of "Fargo." Rolvaag pursues Chaz and Hammernut even as he dreams of escaping crazy Florida for Minnesota, his more sober and seasonal home state. The characters at this level, particularly the memorable Tool, give "Skinny Dip" much of its power.

What nails it, however, is the Captain, a swamp denizen who, like the former governor Skink of Hiaasen's "Sick Puppy" and "Double Whammy," embodies the wildness that inspires and frustrates Hiaasen.

First, the Captain rescues Ricca after Chaz tries to kill her. He resurfaces at the end in a more definitive encounter.

The Captain hears things. " 'For starters, I'm hearing the same weird duet all day and all night in my head -- "Midnight Rambler" as performed by Eydie Gorme and Cat Stevens,' " he tells Ricca. " 'I'm sure they're perfectly nice folks, but frankly I'm ready to shove a sawed-off down my throat. One blessed hour of silence,' the man said wistfully, 'would be welcome.' "

We next meet the Captain tuning into "Hey Jude," the Bobbie Gentry-Placido Domingo version. Chaz, despite a PhD in wetlands ecology, can't cut through the Captain's cleansing, improbable noise no matter how he cranks his high-jive volume. It's the kind of culture clash that Hiaasen can turn into a revelation.

Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer from Cleveland.