Carl Hiaasens Florida in Fiction and in Reality - Book Report/Review Example

Joanne Kenen (25) calls him endearingly Carl of the Wild. His experience of Florida is not the second hand experience of a touring journalist. In a state where most of the people are either transplants or transients, Hiaasen is native. He has not been away for long periods from Florida. But his career as a journalist has given him the opportunity to travel and hence in his assessment of his homeland there is the comparative advantage of the itinerant journalist who captures the images of other places to look at his own place in a proper comparative perspective.

The image of Florida that he started building in strip Tease, with nave tourists, greedy politicians and larger-than- life villains continues in the Nature Girl. The enthusiasm that he felt for the bizarre, his zest for honesty and his genuine concern for the fate of the planet is part of his strength as journalist and as a novelist (Kenen). Like Ibsen's or Shavian Problem Plays Hiaasen's fiction engages the reader on a discussion of contemporary problems that do not concern the ruthless profiteer but deeply concerns the ultimate welfare of mankind.

Nature Girl is a hilarious novel that makes the reader laugh and laugh and finally laughs him into sense. Honey Santana is the self-proclaimed "queen of lost causes". She has decided to take on the relentless telemarketer, Boyd Shreave.The typical telemarketing business like its parent, mail-order business, is an American product. Indeed, telemarketing department is today an unavoidable component of any business organization. The topicality of Hiaasen's heroine taking on the telemarketing enthusiast makes the Florida of the fiction closer to the Florida of reality.

Paul Glastris, in his Dialing for Dollars gives a historical overview of telemarketing in the US. His article sheds much light on the abuse of telemarketing in Floridia.According to Glastris (11) the tricks of phone fraud are easy to learn. As part of the development of South Florida's swampland companies like Gulf American Properties and Land Services opened many Telemarketing centers known humorously as boiler rooms. These were the schools that trained Florida telemarketing frauds. The fact, Gulf American was censured by the Florida Land Sales Board for encouraging sales men to cheat the investors, gives us the extent of the menace (Glastris, 11).

He sums up the pernicious growth of telemarketing in Florida: " The tactics got more intense, the deceptions more flagrant. By 1983, over 100 boiler rooms were operating out of Florida, swindling investors nationwide out of millions" (Glastris, 11). There are many elements of picaresque novel in Nature Girl. In the true roguish tradition of the picaresque novel the pack of characters that assemble the Ten Thousand Islands in the wilderness of Florida are mostly shady characters whose antecedents smack of rudeness, lewdness and crime.

The mistress of Boyd Shreave, the rude and gullible telemarketer is with his mistress Eugenie who is interestingly enough was the girlfriend of a tabloid murderer. However, Honey Santana is not aware that she is being chased by her former employer Piejack who carries scars of his tendency for sexual harassment in work place in the form of mismatched fingers. Honies ex-husband with his dubious reputation as a drug-runner is also