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Outside Magazine, August 2004
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Code Orange

By Bob Shacochis

SO, WHAT'S REAL, WHAT'S NOT? That's the perverse irony of Hiaasen's fiction: His novels don't create the wacky pathologies of Florida, they simply mirror them, right? Well, maybe.

It's the Miami Vice paradox—the show's weekly body count made the city more attractive to visitors, not less. You can bet his books have done nothing but increase tourism in Florida, upping the sucking power on the state's strange magnetism, and the fact that he has been handsomely rewarded for that leaves him a bit dumbfounded and flirting with guilt.

Therein lies Hiaasen's singular challenge: to stay ahead of the curve of weirdness, that metaphysical trajectory into the social labyrinth where art and life seem to melt into an existential goo. As he chases after the real-life weirdness in the headlines, it's circling back on him, a snake biting its own tail. The minute I'm gone he'll be back hammering away, 24/7, a man unable, he says, "to take for granted or accept as inevitable the kind of corruption and the scandals and the sleaze that is sort of a trademark of Florida.

"What are we telling our kids if we just start shrugging this stuff off? That this is right? Look what we've done to the planet, look what we've done to the place where we live. Somebody has to learn a lesson from this."

Hiaasen is a man inflamed, a man to the diatribe born. And when Florida counts its blessings, his name belongs on the list.
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Contributing editor Bob Shacochis wrote about Kathmandu for Outside's 20th anniversary, in October 1997.
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