← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Carl Hiaasen's New Florida Fever Dream Novel, 'Fever Beach'
00:18:39
Carl Hiaasen discusses his latest novel, titled "Fever Beach," which lampoons white supremacy and far-right extremism.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Alison Stewart
You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Master satirist Carl Hiaasen is back with a new novel aimed at mocking white supremacists in his home state of Florida. At the center of the story is Dale. He's not the sharpest tool in the shed. He's been kicked out of the Proud Boys and has started a far right hate group called Strokers for Liberty. You heard me right. He has a high profile backer, a corrupt Florida congressman who fungals $2 million donated by some rich anti Semites. The front is a service group of children who build homes called the Wee Hammers. Yep, kids with power tools. But Dale's plan keeps getting foiled by a wily pair, his tenant Vera and Tully Spree, an angry millionaire who is passionate about protecting the environment. The New York Times says the book is full of dark money, white power and colorful weirdos. The novel is titled Fever Beach. And Carl Hiaasen joins me in studio. It is a pleasure to have you here.
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Carl Hiaasen
It's good to see you, Alison.
- [01:32]
Alison Stewart
You are one of my favorite authors. You already know that.
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Carl Hiaasen
Well, thank you.
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Alison Stewart
What was the seed of inspiration for this book?
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Carl Hiaasen
Well, everything that was happening politically, you know, you're already sort of in that sense. And then one day I got up and I went out to get the newspaper from my driveway and there was this Ziploc bag and it had been weighted down with rice and inside had been inserted this, you know, anti Semitic screed. And I looked up and down the street and every driveway had one. So someone who was throwing these out of their window of their car, I don't know what they were hoping to accomplish. But just, you know, being a writer in addition to being, you know, repelled by the idea, I thought it popped in my mind, who are these idiots? And then, and I thought they might, they might belong in a book.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah.
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Carl Hiaasen
You know, so I mean, when you start to imagine the lives of people who take the time, you know, they're in some crappy apartment, one guy is holding the Ziploc open, the other guy's pouring the rice in and inserting the hate litter. And then, and then they've got to Drive around, one's driving, the other's got to throw. So that's their lives. I just thought maybe, maybe they're worth looking at.
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Alison Stewart
Some of the book is really funny, but then you start to think about some of the issues that you're tackling with and they're really, they're dire. White supremacy and corruption. How do you find the funny and how do you balance it out?
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Carl Hiaasen
It's a trick, but I think it's also a survival mechanism. I mean, to cope with just the headlines every day. And this in particular was after January 6th, which watching that was, I think, upsetting to everybody. It didn't matter what your politics were. But I thought, you know, it's a way to cope, but also to examine the, in a way the stupidity of some of the hatred and some of it's just stupid and inexplicable and, you know, I mean, for instance, I mean, Florida had more January 6th defendants than any other state. And I thought, well, that deserves some sort of mention, some sort of notice too. And then I, as a Floridian, asking why, you know, why here the Proud Boys started in, in Miami and, and honestly, it would be a bigger bunch of bumblers you, you couldn't find. But I was going to take it to these characters who, who got like 86 from the problem. One of them couldn't even make the Proud Boys. And that's how. Imagine if you can't. That's a low bar and you can't make that. But if you're out there throwing Ziploc baggies in people's driveways, you've, you've, you.
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Alison Stewart
Know, and not spelling holocaust, right?
- [04:19]
Carl Hiaasen
No, they have a lot of trouble with spelling. And the other thing, the other thing is the, the swastikas, they have to keep practicing drawing them because, you know, if you're going to be distributing this, you at least got to get, get it right. The main, you know, symbol for the. For Hitler. Right. And they can't, you know, they're always, they've got Sharpies out and they're sitting there practicing on cocktail napkins. But that, I promise you, is probably not far fetched.
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Alison Stewart
How did you learn how white supremacists talk? Did you spend time on message boards.
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Carl Hiaasen
Or did you imagine. Mostly I don't go into those. On the message boards and the Internet, you talk about depressing. And also as a writer and someone who reads a lot, almost as disturbing as the message is the grammatical mess and the, and the sheer mangling of the English language. It's hard to look at on a message board. No, I, I mean, I mean, I look at. I grew up down in Florida, and I was. I've been around in a lot of. I don't want to say rednecks, because I'm probably a redneck, but. Yeah. So, I mean, it wasn't hard to imagine. And then I also, what I did do was I watched a lot of the interviews. We couldn't help but see it in the wake of January 6th, and some of the people that had come up from Florida who were clearly, they weren't just there because of a. They were, you know, especially Republicans. They were there because they wanted to push an agenda. Listen to them be interviewed and like. And then just the likes of Alex Jones and those kinds of monsters, you know, I. You can pick up. You get the idea. You get the tempo of what's going on.
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Unknown
You have written about Florida. You write about its beauty. You write about people who seek to destroy it. What's changed, let's say, in the past five years?
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Carl Hiaasen
Well, I mean, one thing that's changed is that there was a time when all of us who wrote down there and, you know, and I worked for the Miami Herald for all this is when we all felt kind of proprietary about the weirdness and depravity. We felt we're a special place. We're at a whole other level than the rest.
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Unknown
Florida man does X, Y or Z, right?
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Carl Hiaasen
And this was even before the hashtag. We just felt like we could tell by the scroll of. On a news story whether it happened in Florida or not. You knew. Now it's. It's fret, it's spread. And I feel like Washington has been infected with Florida people and that we don't have it all to ourselves anymore. You know, it used to be just south Florida. Then it was all the way up finally from Key west to Pensacola. Yet it was all weird. And then now you see the headlines. Like, the other day there was a story about a. Somebody woman got arrested. And it was a raccoon sitting in her car with a meth pipe. And I said, you know, and they had little meth pipe in its hands. And I said, well, that's got to be Florida. And it wasn't. It was like somewhere in the Midwest. I was. I was freaked out. So what's happening to the world? That's a Florida story. And the raccoon wasn't smoking, but he was holding like he knew how to smoke.
- [07:37]
Unknown
My guest is Carl Hiason. His new novel Fever beach is out. Now, let's talk about some of the other characters in the book. So you got Dale, not too bright, packing those bags full of rife and misspellings of Holocaust, et cetera. But he's got this woman who's a tenant. Her name is Viva. She's liberal, we assume because she reads New Yorker, and she's kind of stuck living there.
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Carl Hiaasen
Yeah, she got bad marriage, was moving to Florida to get away from a situation like a lot of people do. And. And it's expensive to live in Florida, believe it or not. And so she ends up renting a room. When she rents it, she doesn't know she's running from Dale, that he's a white supremacist. But then she stumbles onto the whole Ziploc operation and she just says, okay, you're not doing that in front of me, and you're doing it in this room. And I don't want to see. Because she thinks they're harmless haters. And if you're around them or you see them sometimes, you would think, well, they're just. Can't be a threat to anybody. They can barely get out the door in the morning. But then she realizes eventually that what they're doing is serious and that they're bad folks. And they're part of a bigger picture. These guys. They think that they'll solidify their place in the pantheon of white supremacists if they steal or control an election, a small congressional election in Florida up in the pan. And they set about to. They figured the One precinct is all they can handle. They can't really steal much more than that. But they're going to do the One Precinct. And she has to get involved along with Twilley and to thwart that. But she gets drawn into it. I like that character a lot. She has a lot going on. She's working for a charitable foundation that she thinks is doing good things, and they're just washing a lot of cash. Again, Florida. I mean, none of that's surprise. So, you know. But I do like her.
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Alison Stewart
You mentioned Twilly and Tooley has appeared in your novels before.
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Carl Hiaasen
Yes, he appeared in Sick Puppy, and then he was in one of the. One of the books I wrote for kids for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. But I like the idea of someone who's a conservationist, environmentalist, but who's not conventional. In other words, he really has a short fuse. He's got all this money that he inherited. He doesn't think he deserves it. So he's going to Spend it fighting for what he believes in. But he doesn't have much anger management at all. So when something happens, he just goes off and does something. But he can afford it.
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Alison Stewart
In books, lots of people, a lot of writers I talk to, they say they have empathy for their characters, even the bad ones. What's your approach to empathy when you're writing, especially these not great characters?
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Carl Hiaasen
It's hard because I know in my novels, this is the selfish part of writing. You know, if you're in journalism, as I was, and a lot of all your life, you don't get to write a lot of happy endings. And you certainly don't get to control how the stories if the bad guy's gonna get what they deserve. But I know going in that these guys are going to get something at the end. And so I don't know how much empathy I have. I have empathy for their, like, friends and family because they've turned out this way. And like, in Dale's case, his mom. His mom who used to be a professional boxer. So she has to come over every now and then, just. Just beat him around. You know, she gives him a left right a couple times. And so because he'll say something so offensive, it comes out of his mouth. And she, in her own mind is going to. Where does this come from? How did I raise this person to be this way? I mean, the scene itself can be humorous, but my empathy is with. If one of my kids turned out that way, that's how I would feel.
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Alison Stewart
I felt that way about her as well, because she's thinking like, you're my child. What are you doing? Why are you doing this?
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Carl Hiaasen
And then she even tries dragging him to church one day, but it turns out she's got a beef. And she doesn't stay long in church because she's got an old beef with the church. But I mean, she's trying in her own way, but she doesn't understand it. I think I know people who don't understand the directions that some family members take, whether it's politically or any other way that all of a sudden, how did they turn out like this? And that's kind of where that's come from.
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Alison Stewart
There are people in this novel who are very, very wealthy. The corrupt congressman comes from wealth from his father. You've got Twilly Spree. He's wealthy. You've got the billionaires who are giving their money to things that are somewhat anti Semitic. What did you want to explore about wealthy people? The relationship of.
- [12:21]
Carl Hiaasen
I was. I didn't think of it like that. It's just, that's one of the things that's happened in Florida. I mean, we've always had wealth migrating there, but because of the tax laws in places, you know, state income tax in places like California and New York. And frankly, that's why Trump changed his residence to Florida. It's, you know, we call it the six months and one dayers. Oh, yes, because if you have to take six months in one day and you can claim you're a resident, then, you know, then you don't pay any state income tax at your other residents. And so, so there is a ton of money, particularly in South Florida. You know, obviously Palm beach just, it's just a boatload of, just from the, if nothing else, just from all the Fox News hosts that have bought second homes down there.
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Alison Stewart
You know, it's interesting because President Trump, as you said, resident of Florida, a.
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Unknown
Lot of people like him because they think he's kind of funny. How can humor be a powerful tool in politics?
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Carl Hiaasen
Well, I don't know that he's ever been accused of being witty. He might be funny, but, I mean, but he's not incapable of charm, especially one on one. I know a lot of people that know him. But the performative part of the politics, where you're appealing to the worst instincts, for instance, where let's let in, you know, we're going to throw out all these people who, Haitians, Cubans, others who literally are going to go back to society where they could be persecuted. But let's let the white South, South Africans in because there's a group that's, that's really down on their luck. Right. So, I mean, that kind of thing, that's funny, objectively funny, but when in real life. But if you write satire, it's the sort of thing, I mean, the satire has a target or it's not satire. I mean, it's not slapstick. It's not. And it's tough to walk that line. You're right, it is. And there are people that, you know, I mean, I know there's why Florida went solidly for Trump, but I'm not sure a lot of those voters right now who are very, very unsteady and feeling like, what did we do? I don't think they saw all of it coming and, and who could. But, you know, I mean, as a, as I think as a novelist or even as a journalist, you're, you're, you know, you've got to just look at it all in a different way as you necessarily. Than it would as a citizen.
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Unknown
You know, in the novel, some of the details, they're hilarious. You know, Jonas is this guy. He's a. He's in the strokers for liberty. He's got a beard that's dyed red, white, and blue. He has a dog named Himmler.
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Carl Hiaasen
Oh, that's based on a real dog. I knew.
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Unknown
Seriously?
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Carl Hiaasen
Yes. His dog's name is Himmler. But I. I was. I was on an island in Belize, off Belize. I'm not lying. And it was a camp, a fishing camp. And the. The dog, the mascot, was named Hitler. It was a pit bulldog named Hitler. And. And I said, you know how. What? Hitler. And they explained that the dog belonged to one of the guys who lived there, and he broke girlfriend. And the girlfriend named the dog Hitler because she didn't like the dog. So now everybody call, and you'd literally say, come on, Hitler. Come here. And he. But anyway, so that was. I'm not lying. And it actually. It was. The dog was sick, and it was sad. He sat outside my room and howled all night long. Hitler did. No, I'm not. I. This is a real thing. So go on. I'm sorry.
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Unknown
You just. That. That answered my question, actually. That answered my question. You know, as you're reading the characters, and I'm like, there's certain people who resemble congressmen. Oh, you think there's a certain kind of congressman? Do you go to your imagination, or are your targets right there?
- [16:23]
Carl Hiaasen
Well, in Florida, a lot of times, they're right in front of you. I mean, you know, I wrote the column for so many years for the Herald, and then about a couple weeks after I retired in 2021, I didn't write the column anymore, and I was feeling okay about not writing a column. And then the Matt Gaetz story broke, and I was. I was crestfallen. I was morose because it was just a slow pitch down the middle of the plate, and I wasn't there to take a swing at it. You know, they're right there. Ron DeSantis, every day, right there. I mean, you know, you don't. It's true. It's kind of easy pickings, but at the same time, it is a place that I love and care about and the only place I've ever lived in my life. So it's what gets back to what you were talking about earlier. There are mixed feelings. You know, you have to go after these things, but at the same time, yeah, you're laughing, but you just. You just want your hope and pray that your readers are laughing for the right reason. They get it. They get it.
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Alison Stewart
You wrote once that my friend Pete Hamill never gave up on New York. That's how I feel about Florida.
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Carl Hiaasen
Yep.
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Alison Stewart
What remains magical about Florida to you?
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Carl Hiaasen
Oh, gosh. Well, I can still get the car and drive a couple hours and then get in a boat and drive for a while and be in a place in the Everglades that looks like it must have looked eons ago. And no other boats, nothing. And you can still find those places. And that's magical to me. And, you know, being in a mangrove forest somewhere where no planes going over, no boats, but. And you see things all the time. Like, I mean, I know that I live in just a typical kind of suburban neighborhood, but we have, you know, bobcats walk through the yard. I think that's so cool. I know this sounds corny, but we have a little owl box. So we have screech owls that come every year, and they. They stay in there and they poke their little heads out. It's. It's corny, but there's still a lot of wildlife and there's still nature. If you just let it catch its breath, a little bit will come back after things. And those kinds of things keep you going. Because now maybe my grandkids will get to see that. My fear always was watching this get paved over where they're not going to get to see all the cool stuff that I saw when I was a kid. But now and then I see some. Okay, you know, this is worth fighting for.
- [18:49]
Alison Stewart
My review of this book is that.
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Unknown
It is.
- [18:51]
Alison Stewart
It is snort worthy.
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Carl Hiaasen
I love that.
- [18:55]
Alison Stewart
The name of it is Fever beach by Carl Hiason. Thank you for coming in.
- [18:59]
Carl Hiaasen
Oh, thanks, Alison.
- [19:00]
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