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Book Review: Carl Hiaasen's Star Island
Many fans of Carl Hiaasen's satirical novels have worried that he's lost his mojo. Recent books have seemed strained, even formulaic, and simply not as funny as earlier novels. I'm happy to be here to tell you that the man has regained his mojo in a big way, and in Star Island, his prodigious talents roar through the pages like a runaway clown car.
Hiaasen is one of our greatest satirists of life in the U.S., his nearly exclusive focus on Florida notwithstanding. After all, a greedy idiot in Florida is still a greedy idiot, something every section of the country possesses in torrents. In Star Island, Hiaasen tackles America's goofy/sick celebrity culture. It's a subject that provides some easy targets, but Hiaasen flogs them for all he's worth, working up a blistering satire that's the equal of anything he's created before.
The story revolves around one Cherry Pye (real name Cheryl Bunterman), a 22-year-old Britney-esque pop star whose career is on the skids due to her, um, unpredictability. Since her hit debut at age 15 on Jailbait Records, her ferocious, indiscriminate appetite for drugs, booze and sex has driven Cherry in and out of various rehab attempts, and strained the patience of her fans. That and, of course, her near total lack of talent, which has turned her performances into lip synchs (she's having trouble remembering her new single, "Jealous Bone" from the album Skantily Klad). Her mother, the deliciously exploitive Janet Bunterman, battles to save her meal-ticket/daughter's career, with the help of Cherry Pye's producer Maury Lykes, assorted bodyguards, a pair of P.R.-slinging sisters whose plastic surgeries make them look like twins, and Ann DeLusia, an "undercover stunt double" who shows up at events as Cherry whenever the singer is too incapacitated to make it.
Paparazzo Bang Abbott is determined to make his fortune by photographing Cherry in passed-out-near-O.D. mode, but winds up so frustrated, he kidnaps her (at least he thinks it's her, but it's really Ann DeLusia). Meanwhile, Hiaasen brings back two familiar characters: the former Florida governor Clinton "Skink" Tyree, now a wacked-out, roadkill-eatin' eco-vigilante, who falls for Ann DeLusia while threatening a sleazebag developer; and Chemo, last seen in Skin Tight but now out of prison and still sporting a modified weedeater on the stub of his left arm, who becomes Cherry's bodyguard (and her producer's last-ditch attempt to save her).
The exuberance and biting barbs of Hiaasen's early novels are present in full force, particularly in his depiction of Cherry Pye herself, whose shallow, self-indulgent, clueless narcissism is by turns gut-busting funny and horrific, as in this scene in which a security man goes to her dressing room, where she is "splayed immodestly."
She was drinking a Red Bull while listening to the album cut of "Jealous Bone" on her iPod, attempting without success to nail the lip synch. Kurt plucked out her ear buds and said she had exactly three minutes ...
"You believe in reincarnation?" Cherry asked
The dressing room smelled like grass; Kurt glanced around and spotted a half-smoked doobie balanced on the rim of a veggie platter.
"I wanna come back as, like, a bird-of-paradise, or maybe a seashell," Cherry said. "What about you?"
"I want to come back as Beyonce's bicycle seat," said the security man. "Now let's go."
The satire never lets up, with priceless scenes of Skink trying to negotiate urban reality in Miami, Bang's multiple payoffs to paparazzi-alerting spies working their police scanners, and the venal disregard of Cherry's entourage for her welfare. Here, her producer Maury shows his sensitivity when Cherry's mother tells him the singer has escaped a rehab clinic once again, this time with a drummer from a band called the Poon Pilots.
"Beautiful. She couldn't run off with a lead singer, I suppose. Some ripped, sensitive surfer guy that every teenage girl in America wants to ball. No, your daughter goes for the scrawny no-talent scag freak with rotted teeth. What a moving love story — I can't wait to read it in the tabs."
Longtime Hiaasen fans will love his return to over-the-top, savagely manic satire, and new readers are gonna want to jump into the author's other worthy books like Native Tongue, Skin Tight or Skinny Dip. Meanwhile, they can climb aboard Hiaasen's latest proof that life in the fast lane is often a one-way street to terminal idiocy.
Star Island by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95).
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