The great Florida books'
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By Connie Ogle
McClatchy Newspapers
(MCT)
What constitutes a classic Florida book? An author's passion for sabal palms, hurricane warnings, mildew, mojitos and the ability to pluck nuggets of truth from our rich and sometimes ugly history? A wicked sense of humor about the subtropical oddities — flying cucarachas, copulating iguanas, six-toed cats, swamp-eating developers — skittering through our everyday lives? We like to think that the theme that sets true South Florida literary classics apart from books spawned elsewhere is their unerring sense of the place and the people who constitute Florida's bizarre mixture of paradise and hell.
"Florida was to Americans what America had always been to the rest of the world — a fresh, free, unspoiled start," writes Susan Orlean in "The Orchid Thief." To us, though, Floridais something else: home. Here are some of the timeless classics that capture life in the Sunshine State:
—"Their Eyes Were Watching God," Zora Neale Hurston: Published in 1937 and set in Eatonville near Orlando, this gorgeous novel about an African-American woman's journey of self-discovery was once snubbed by intellectuals for its use of dialect and its refusal to frame the rural black experience within the context of the white world. But Hurston's exquisite rendering of Janie — who "saw her life like a great tree in leaf with things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches" — outlasted criticism to become one of the great American novels of all time.
—"Killing Mr. Watson," Peter Matthiessen: Now seamlessly melded with "Lost Man's River" and "Bone by Bone" into the National Book Award-winning "Shadow Country," the trilogy's cornerstone reimagines the life and death of a Florida pioneer at the turn of the century. Set in Chokoloskee and the Ten Thousand Islands and based on the life of one Edgar J. Watson who, legend says, gunned down Belle Starr, "Mr. Watson" opens with a murder and winds inexorably back in time, painting a picture of a lawless and violent world.
—"The Everglades: River of Grass," Marjory Stoneman Douglas: This Bible of the Everglades, published in 1947, painstakingly reconstructs the history and makeup of what was once considered a vast, useless, mosquito-infested swamp and was instrumental in spurring efforts to preserve the area. "There are no other Everglades in the world," Douglas wrote, and she dedicated a big chunk of her 108 years to helping preserve them.
—"The Yearling," Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Readers most remember with dismay this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel's tragic conclusion, but had we lived in a tiny rural town not far from Gainesville in the 1930s, we'd have realized that Jody's pet deer Flag was doomed from the start. In this memorable coming-of-age story, Rawlings also sharply evokes a time, a people and a place, much as she did in her nonfiction "Cross Creek."
—"The Deep Blue Good-by," John D. MacDonald: His later novels — "The Empty Copper Sea" and "The Green Ripper," say — are better and less dated. But with this mystery involving the first in a (seemingly endless) series of young women in desperate need of a knight in shining armor, MacDonald kicked off a trend that influenced more Florida crime writers than crime did. "Salvage consultant" Travis McGee, who resides on the houseboat Busted Flush in Slip F-18 at Fort Lauderdale's Bahia Mar Marina, is a self-described beach bum, spiritual and smart and not above the occasional bout of violence. His stoic heroism paved the way for tough-guy private eyes such as Randy Wayne White's violence-prone Doc Ford and James W. Hall's resourceful Thorn.
—"The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession," Susan Orlean: Few of us knew flowers could be sexy until Orlean delved into the weird, wonderful world of the obsessed. Front and center of her riveting bestseller, set largely in southwest Florida's Fakahatchee Strand, is John Laroche, the colorful and felonious horticulture consultant who dreams of making a fortune by cloning the rare ghost orchid. Orlean's story is so compelling you almost can see yourself dodging alligators as you traipse through the swamp. Almost.
—"The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat," Edna Buchanan: In her first book, The Miami Herald's Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter shares true tales about a stunning variety of deplorable acts, reminding us that no matter how creative you are, you just can't make up this stuff. Buchanan went on to write the Britt Montero suspense series, and her celebrity inspired Calvin Trillin to write, "In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by first name among people they have never actually met. One of them is Fidel. Another is Edna."
—"Miami Blues," Charles Willeford: Detective Hoke Moseley can't even hang onto his teeth in Willeford's novel, but he's nonetheless dogged enough to track down a bad guy and his hooker girlfriend. Willeford, who died in 1988, highlighted the dirt and decadence of Miami long before they became fashionable, in an entertaining four-book series we only wish had gone on longer.
—"Tourist Season," Carl Hiaasen: At some point while reading this darkly comic suspense novel about a whacked-out newspaper columnist who kills off tourists — ostensibly to return Florida to its pristine state — every native thinks: "Say, this is kind of a good idea... . " Hiaasen went on to savage other important aspects of Florida life: bass fishing ("Double Whammy"); cosmetic surgery ("Skin Tight"); strip clubs ("Strip Tease") and hurricanes ("Stormy Weather," allegedly a novel, but one that reads like pure fact to anyone who lived here in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew).
—"Rum Punch," Elmore Leonard: Leonard unleashed his trademark ruffians — who fit in quite well here — in this story about a stewardess, a bail bondsman, and a dangerous gun runner in Palm Beach County. Quentin Tarantino liked it so much he relocated the story to Los Angeles and turned white Jackie Burke into "Jackie Brown." Long live Pam Grier! Leonard also used our subtropical backdrop in such novels as "La Brava" (in which a former Secret Service agent becomes messily involved with a fading movie star); "Maximum Bob" (about a Palm Beach County judge) and "Out of Sight" (based on the prisoner escape at Glades Correctional). The film adaptation helped kick off J-Lo's stardom.
—"Miami," Joan Didion: "Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accommodated," writes Didion, who goes on to describe Miami as a sort of Latin American capital in a subtropical, tip-of-the-U.S. paradise bathed in sunshine but awash in all sorts of shadowy deals. Aimed mostly at outsiders, "Miami" explores the history of the Cuban exiles and what Didion views as their betrayal by the U.S. government.
—"To Have and Have Not," Ernest Hemingway: It will never be mistaken for Papa's best work (we are fond of "The Sun Also Rises," although impassioned arguments can and will be made for "The Old Man and the Sea"). But fishing boat captain Harry Morgan, desperate in the heart of the Great Depression, makes a fateful decision to smuggle contraband from Cuba to Florida. Confused? That's because you're thinking of the Bogart/Bacall film, which had almost nothing but its title in common with Hemingway's novel.
—"Continental Drift," Russell Banks: Through the eyes of an unlucky blue-collar worker from New Hampshire and an impoverished Haitian immigrant, Florida — Miami in particular — shines like a welcoming beacon. No cold winters or poverty or terror in this land of plenty, they think, and make their separate hazardous journeys. And then they learn the truth. The novel, perhaps Banks' best, comes to its shattering conclusion in Little Haiti.
—"The Paper Boy," Pete Dexter: Dexter ("Paris Trout") delves into Southern-style journalism and thorny family ties with this novel about two brothers — one a newspaper deliveryman in North Florida, the other a Miami reporter — who join forces to investigate the death of a small-town sheriff.
—"Brother, I'm Dying," Edwidge Danticat: The immigrant's story is Florida's story, and Danticat reveals its ugly side. This sobering memoir about her father and her uncle, brothers separated for 30 years, winds through two places deeply connected to South Florida: New York and Haiti. Danticat lived in Haiti with her uncle, a minister, when her parents emigrated to the United States; later she joined them in New York. Worried about increasing violence at home, her uncle eventually fled to Miami, where he was promptly imprisoned by Homeland Security and, while his niece tried to navigate a bureaucratic hell and free him, died at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
—"In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd," Ana Menendez. All the stories in the debut collection evoke longing and discontent. But none is so powerfully melancholic as the title story, in which four men gather in Little Havana to play dominoes, tell jokes and dream of a homeland lost to them forever.
—"Ninety-two in the Shade," Thomas McGuane: This novel's opening lines echo a painfully relevant truth: "Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic." Still don't know; never will. But like many a traveler in fiction, Thomas Skelton thinks he can flee trouble by returning home to Key West. Remember the old adage "You can't go home again"? Skelton should have heeded it. He hopes to make a living as a fishing guide but instead meets his nemesis, the murderous skiff guide Nichol Dance.
—"Fiskadoro," Denis Johnson: In his second novel, National Book Award winner Johnson ("Tree of Smoke") conjures a post-apocalyptic fever dream about nuclear war survivors in the Keys. Young Fiskadoro remembers no life before the war, but his elders try to reconcile past and future and separate true memories from false.
—Just about anything by Harry Crews: We jest, of course; some of Crews' best work ("Feast of Snakes," say) isn't even set in Florida. But plenty of the books by this master of the Southern Gothic novel have a connection to the Sunshine State. Where better to set such strange mayhem? The martial-arts obsessed cast of "Karate is a Thing of the Spirit" practices kicks and punches in an abandoned pool in Broward County. "All We Need of Hell" satirizes campus antics in Gainesville, and "Body's" bodybuilders head to Miami for a final showdown. The gritty memoir "A Childhood: Biography of a Place" winds from backwoods Georgiato Jacksonville, also the setting of Crews' novel "Car," in which a guy decides to eat a Ford Maverick on national TV. Having briefly owned a Maverick, I can tell you that eating one is certainly more pleasurable than driving one.
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Connie Ogle: cogle@MiamiHerald.com
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(c) 2009, The Miami Herald.
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