During the years when I worked, mostly without distinction, atThe Miami Herald, Carl Hiaasen was both a crusading metro columnist and someone (for me, at least) to be assiduously avoided.
Hiaasen’s take-no-prisoners columns were superb, his keypad a weapon of considerable empowerment for the downtrodden and the ordinary, the taxpayer and the lover of a Florida that was simpler, more homogeneous, less trafficked (in both cocaine and by the ubiquitous automobile) and environmentally pristine.
Hiaasen, with the narrow waist and youthful glow of a distance runner, the wavy hair and carefree mien of a prep school student, and an unusual bi-voweled name of Northern European extraction, cut quite a figure in that time. He was doing serious work, expertly wielding the tools available to a big city daily columnist: sarcasm, parody and an opinion writer’s distillation of the facts as they were reported by the newsroom grunts. He waged a righteous fight against corrupt and self-aggrandizing pols, rapacious developers, smug sycophants and, often enough, Miami’s newly landed gentry whose fervor (for freedom, riches, power) disregarded both constitutional niceties and the political and business old guard that had ruled South Florida in the years when Hiaasen was coming of age. I, on the other hand, wrote for the sports page about, among other less important pursuits, golf.
Yes, in those days, golf was to someone with Hiaasen’s view both offending cause and effect, a tool foremost of a particularly despicable type of land developer who would fill pristine wetlands along the eastern edge of the Everglades, design a golf course behind exclusionary gated walls and then line those same fairways with highly priced homes. Aside from the raw environmental desecration, there was the ongoing conspicuous consumption of resources (water, land) by golfers and residents within these club communities, and the collectivization of the right-leaning types who gather behind those citadels of economic and ethnic exclusion where they might plot further plunder of Florida’s finite resources.
Of all the crimes against nature that land developers might commit, nothing was so flagrant and arrogant as how they entitled their golf-centric communities, adopting the names of the very animals and birds whose habitat they had narrowed and, in their reckless disregard, driven toward extinction. There ought to be a law against it, or so Hiaasen memorably wrote.
What qualified him to write such things, I can’t be certain. But he communicated them with rare gusto and unbridled belief. In reading him during those years, there was very definitely a sense he and his family and those who arrived before waves of immigrants and transplants (like me) had a right to live in a tropical paradise that would not materially change despite basic human impulses such as the need for shelter and transportation, food and water, gainful employment and occasional recreation.
As a sportswriter and golf correspondent I was tasked with conveying the highlights of games played upon the fouled marshscape. So I guessed I’d have had little in common with Hiaasen. Even when I was in proximity to him with a chance to offer a word of sincere admiration for his work, I would think better of it. What could we possibly discuss?
So after all that, and the passage of a good number of years, you might imagine my surprise when I learned that Hiaasen, whose many celebrated works of antic fiction have reinforced his reputation as land developers’ most fervid literary scourge, had authored a book about, of all things, playing golf.
How could a writer who owed some portion of his ascendancy to pillorying both those who built golf courses and the selfish patrons and homeowners who paid the wages of sin come so far full circle to now embrace a game and its trappings? Talk about miraculous conversions. Hiaasen extolling the virtues, the rigors, the natural settings of golf was like St. Paul not only being struck from the horse on the road to Damascus, but rising to jump the shark in the very next moment.
Wanting to give Hiaasen every benefit of the doubt, I decided I was not going to purchaseThe Downhill Lie. In the meantime, I did manage to read at least a few reviews,threeof which,somewhat inexplicably, ran inThe New York Times. — Robert Lohrer
[Editor's note:If you're wondering where the actual review of Carl Hiaasen'sThe Downhill Lieis, please be patient. Robert thought the possibilities for hypocrisy so rich, the sellout so matter of fact, that he decided to "live blog" the review or to contemporaneously record his thoughts. The above 10 paragraphs were written after Robert read the book jacket only. Readers of this website are aware, up front, he is sharing his biases that probably would have disqualified him from writing a review of the book for any mainstream publication. Although he says any review that didn't examine the possibility that Hiaasen was reversing course in the extreme would fall short of being thorough.]