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Skinny Dip (novel)

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Skinny Dip AuthorCarl HiaasenCountryUnited StatesLanguageEnglishGenreNovelPublisherAlfred A. Knopf2004Media typePrint (hardback and paperback)Pages355 pp (first edition, hardback)ISBN0-375-41108-9 (first edition, hardback)OCLC54349637813/.54 22LC ClassPS3558.I217 S575 2004Preceded byBasket Case Followed byNature Girl
Skinny Dip is a caper novel by Carl Hiaasen first published in 2004. It is his 11th work of fiction for adult readers. It is his fifth book featuring the character known as "Skink" and his second novel including the character Mick Stranahan, a former detective. It involves a murder plot and a subsequent attempt to exact revenge against the backdrop of a threat to Florida's Everglades National Park.

Discussion
Hiaasen's novels are often classified as "Crime Fiction" (or "environmental thrillers"), but they can also be read as satirical and comic mainstream novels depicting people in difficult and outrageous situations triggered by human weaknesses such as greed, lust, ignorance, or revenge.

Plot
In his review of Strip Tease, Donald E. Westlake commented that, at the center of all the wackiness was an accessible, touching storyline: a single mother's quest to rescue her young daughter from a reckless husband and an inadequate foster care system. Skinny Dip has at its center a wife who survives a murder attempt by her husband, and is driven not just by the need to get even, but to find out the reason he did it. This gives the novel more focus than some of Hiaasen's other books, which often involve the characters running across each other in random ways, or going on unplanned wanderings across Florida.

The other central plot is the fight to save the Everglades, and the role that the villains are playing in its destruction. Somewhere along the way, the two plot lines converge, and the quest to take revenge on Chaz becomes tied up with the aim of stopping Red's pollution.

In other words, the reader is offered a choice of which thing to root for: some readers may think that Chaz's betrayal of the environment for money makes him detestable, but trying to murder his wife is what makes him a true monster; other readers may think the exact opposite.

Skinny Dip is also enriched by a variety of subplots: Tool's gradual moral awakening, as he grows closer to a dying old lady who is too proud to admit that she has been abandoned by her family; Karl Rolvaag's longing for his native Minnesota, and his search for his escaped pet pythons; Chaz's obsession with sex and his desperate attempts to reverse the erectile dysfunction which is his only sign of guilt over Joey's murder, including experimenting with a black-market version of Viagra � "the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) definitely would not approve."; and finally, the suitcase full of money, which changes hands until it falls into the grip of the least likely person in the story.

The novel contains many scenes reminiscent of classic farces. For instance, at one point there are five people in the Perrone house, three of whom are trying to hide their presence from the other: at the center is Chaz and his "back-up" girlfriend Medea, with whom he has just unsuccessfully attempted sexual relations; hiding under the bed is Joey, caught in the middle of another infiltration of the house; Tool is in another part of the house, ordered to protect Perrone but ordered by him to stay out of the way of his date; and finally Mick, who enters in search of Joey and, when he encounters Tool, politely asks him if he's going to try to stop Mick. ("What a dumb-ass question. Of course I am.")

In a similar situation, Chaz, expecting sex with Rose, is drunk and drugged and lured into bed, not knowing that the woman he's groping for is in fact his wife.

Other funny situations arise out of Chaz's paranoia and ineptness as a killer. He imagines he's surrounded by enemies, but he always manages to look in the wrong direction. Even when the truth � for example, Joey � is right in front of him, he attributes it to hallucinations caused by the West Nile virus, rather than recognizing it for a sophisticated hoax.

Accuracy of Environmental Reporting
In his review of Skinny Dip for The New Republic, Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald criticized the book as being too fictionalized, and potentially misleading, in describing the causes of the Everglades' ecological status. In Hiaasen's scenario, the Everglades are dying as a result of agricultural contaminants dumped by greedy corporate villains, aided and abetted by corrupt or complacent officials.

Grunwald maintains that the state effort to curtail agricultural pollution is separate from the Everglades Restoration Project, and had been largely successful even before the Project commenced in 2000. Instead, the biggest threat to the Everglades comes not from corporate pollution or corrupt officials, but rather from "John Q. Public" � the diversion of freshwater for South Florida's huge municipalities, and the normal waste products associated with such cities. Grunwald says that when conservation efforts should focus on curtailing the effects of public activity, it is misleading and dangerous to lay all the blame on "bad guys" personified by Red Hammernut and Chaz.

On the other hand, Grunwald agrees that it is "smart to be cynical" about Florida politics, "especially all the daily blathering about conserving our precious natural resources." A recurring theme in Grunwald's book, The Swamp, is that for the majority of Florida's history, the Everglades has been viewed as a hostile territory, a nuisance, or an obstacle to growth, and only very recently has perception changed to regard it as a place worth saving.

Hiaasen is also scathing about this in the chapter when he briefly summarizes the history of the Everglades, and how ninety percent of it has been destroyed through the course of South Florida's development:

Inevitably, the Everglades and all its resplendent wildlife began to die, but no one with the power to prevent it even considered trying. It was, after all, just a huge damn swamp.

But later, it became clear that the Everglades' health was linked to South Florida's drinking water, and if the Everglades died, then growth would stop dead:

This apocalyptic scenario was laid out before Florida's politicians, and in no time at all even the most slatternly among them was extolling the Everglades as a national treasure, that must be preserved at all costs.

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