Nature Girl Book

If you're at all familiar with Carl Hiaasen's fiction, you pretty much know what to expect when you crack open one of his novels. Hiaasen, who probably invented the genre Wacky Florida Eco/Crime Fiction, has in the past been a brilliant satirist on crazy goings-on in Florida, and every novel he's written pretty much sticks to the same format: Someone (or some entity) commits an eco-crime against Florida, is usually abetted (or the story is otherwise embellished) by an assortment of wackjobs unique to the Florida landscape. Credibility is often thrown out the window for the sake of comedy. Slapstick though it often is, Hiaasen's work has been poignant and often hilarious.

I'm wondering though if there exists in the writing world a "law of diminishing returns" where if you keep writing books with the same formula, eventually you're going to blow your "creative wad". I think "Nature Girl" might be a bellwether novel for Hiaasen: "WRITE SOMETHING ELSE" it screams (at least to this reader). There's only so much wackiness to write about there...it's starting to get trite, Mr. Hiaasen.

The set-up for this one just blows: a woman (Honey Santana, one of Hiaasen's oft-used sage eco-friendly vacant bimbo characters) gets her panties in a wad when a telemarketer trying to sell worthless land to her calls during dinner hour and is rude to her. She evidently is off her meds and decides to get retribution by finding out who this telemarketer is and invite him to an eco-tour of the "10,000 islands"...

Hiaasen expects hilarity to ensue with this set-up...but I think I laughed maybe twice in 300 pages. Coupled with the fact that it seemed like recycled material from his nine previous novels (re-using the same characters from previous novels doesn't usually work unless they're sequels, and to my knowledge none of his novels are sequels), this novel was monumentally boring to me. (The part that I laughed (feebly) at? When one of the numbskulls shoots himself in the privates with a Taser...good times).