Satirizing the Sunshine State

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

Novelist Carl Hiaasen was filling up his motor boat at a gas station in the Florida Keys when he saw tourists tossing fast-food wrappers out of their minivan. He thought about driving after them and maybe taking a crowbar to the windshield. Instead, he got even in his 2000 novel, "Sick Puppy," which opens with a lobbyist tossing trash out of his Jeep window. An irate witness trails the lobbyist and retaliates by emptying a truckload of garbage into his car.

Fenia Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen

Florida has been Mr. Hiaasen's muse since he wrote his first solo novel, "Tourist Season," in 1986. More than 20 books later, Mr. Hiaasen, 57, still finds plenty to satirize in the Sunshine State. "Living in Florida and having been born there, there's not a day that goes by that something doesn't piss me off," he says.

His new novel, "Star Island," tackles celebrity culture and Florida's most star-driven and superficial hubs: South Beach. The novel features an out-of-control young pop star, Cherry Pye, and her entourage of publicists, producers, bodyguards, and cynical and greedy stage parents. Cherry's handlers hope to squash a string of bad publicity with an upcoming concert, but the unruly star overdoses in her South Beach hotel room. The situation deteriorates when a desperate paparazzo kidnaps Ann, an actress whom Cherry's parents have hired to be a body double when Cherry's too drunk or stoned to appear in public.

Mr. Hiaasen, who writes a column for the Miami Herald, spoke with The Wall Street Journal from his summer home in Livingston, Mont., where he is spending his days hiking, fly fishing, writing his next children's book—and escaping the South Florida summer.

The Wall Street Journal: Why did you decide to skewer celebrity subculture in this novel? It seems somewhat vapid and harmless compared to some of the environmental and political issues you've taken on in other novels.

Carl Hiaasen: The amount of time that's devoted to these incredibly insubstantial people who have become famous for absolutely nothing, there's a certain obscenity to that. With all that's going on—we're engaged in two wars—more people know what's happening with Lindsay Lohan today than know about what happened to General McCrystal… It just seems to me that if you're writing satire, you have to deal with this incredible public appetite for news about inconsequential celebrities.

Do you spend much time on South Beach?

It's oddly a place that I avoid at all costs, but it seemed like a perfect setting for a book about the vanity of instant celebrity these days.

A couple of iconic characters from your previous novels show up in "Star Island" —Skink, the former governor of Florida who went nuts and lives naked in the mangroves, and Chemo, a former hit man who is hired as Cherry Pye's bodyguard and has a weed cutter as an artificial hand. Why did you revive these characters?

I hadn't used Chemo for, god, I don't know how many years. He went to prison at the end of the [1989] novel "Skin Tight."…I had gotten a note from [novelist] Elmore Leonard that said, "I'm so glad you didn't kill Chemo off. I really liked him." I sort of had that in the back of my head, and I did the math and I thought, "He ought to be out by now. Even in Florida, he's probably out of the slammer by now, and he probably would be selling mortgages." I was fond of him, as depraved as he was. And Skink is just this old familiar deranged crusader that I keep bringing back because I like him and I get more mail about that character than any other I've created.

A lot of the villains in your novels get punished in creative ways—a sea urchin to the groin for a developer who is destroying mangrove forests, for example. Is writing such scenes cathartic for you?

Very cathartic. When I was in college and I was young, you read these great novels that have these ambiguous, artsy endings—what happened to who, where did the bad guy end up, is the couple staying together? And I think if you have invested a lot in a really rotten character like Bang Abbott, the paparazzo, if you really put your heart and soul into bringing this guy to life, you owe it to your readers to have a poetic and satisfying end to his side of the story.

You tackle a lot of environmental themes in your novels, and you have been writing a lot about BP and the Gulf oil spill in your Miami Herald column. Do you think this episode might make it into a future book?

A guy like [BP chief executive] Tony Hayward, these guys defy satire and become self parodies. When you hop on a yacht in the middle of this and sail in an ocean where there's no oil just to have a little party, now you're getting into Monty Python territory… It's very, very difficult as a novelist to surpass that kind of absurdity. The truth is way worse than anything I can invent, and I can invent some very twisted stuff.

You continue to write a newspaper column despite having a successful career as a novelist. Why is that an important outlet for you?

I know, I know (sighs). I feel it is a privilege to have a newspaper column. I don't know how to blog…With everything that's happening, it's still a privilege to have the ability, once a week, to have a forum, to have a platform… I would be going nuts on the sidelines not having a column when all this lunacy and all this hilarious stuff is taking place.

Has newspaper writing shaped your fiction writing?

Absolutely. You're trained with a journalist's eye for details, little details. Dialogue, for example. One of the first things you have to learn to do as a reporter is to listen, and to listen to exactly how people talk. That's why when you pick up a lot of novels and you see a three page monologue, you know it's absurd. Nobody talks that way.

You've written a couple of children's books that have become bestsellers. It's sort of surprising, given how much sex and violence comes up in your novels. Why did you start writing children's books?

I was astonished when [Knopf editors] asked me to do that. I said, "Haven't you read anything I've written? Would you want your kids to read that?" But the editors were great. They said, the sensibility you have, the irreverence that you have, the themes that you write about, the love of nature—the kids, they love that stuff. They love smart-ass characters. I've been spending my entire adult life as a writer making fun of grown ups, and that's solid gold with kids.

Have you considered setting future novels outside of Florida?

I've never lived anywhere but Florida. I don't think it would be dishonest, but I think I would be not as comfortable. Florida really is a character in the novels. It's hard to separate me and my characters from the state itself.

Write to Alexandra Alter at alexandra.alter@wsj.com