I think I must have the summertime blues. I just haven't found much to love about the season's new books. Case in point is Carl Hiaasen's latest. Normally, I find Hiaasen to be laugh-out-loud fun. This time, I just found his characters to be tiresome.
The problem might be his subject matter. Is there anything more boring than a no-talent pop-culture figure's journey of self-destruction? The train wreck here is 22-year-old Cherry Pye (nee Cheryl Bunterman), who is trying hard to rekindle the success she found at age 15 with her breakout album "Touch Me Like You Mean It" on Jailbait Records. Unfortunately, Cherry (who insists that she now wants to be called Cherish) has spiraled into a sordid frenzy for alcohol and any drug she can lay her hands on. This behavior, naturally, would drive away the tweens who currently love her, so her peeps have hired a look-alike actress, Ann Delusia, to serve as her double whenever the real Cherry Pye is too messed up to be seen in public.
When a desperate paparazzo named Bang Abbott kidnaps Ann--thinking it's Cherry--the pop star's parasitic people face a dilemma. After all, it wasn't even Cherry who was kidnapped. Bang ups the ante by threatening to release some compromising pictures of Ann posing as Cherry, and it's fun to watch everyone try to turn the situation to their own avaricious advantage.
The mayhem is increased by the re-introduction of some favorite characters from previous books. Skink, the former governor of Florida who makes routine appearances in Hiaasen's books, meets Ann and falls into paternal love with her, going so far as to clean up his act and put on a Hermes shirt and a suit by Ermenegilo Zegna. Chemo, the walking dermatology-disaster from Skin Tight who, after his arm was bitten off by a barracuda, had it replaced by a weed whacker, serves as Cherry's bodyguard. I suspect the overly-botoxed publicists who underwent surgery to become identical twins may have made an appearance in a previous book as well.
As with many of Hiaasen's books, the normal, honorable character--in this case, Ann--is truly heroic, able to double-cross the greedy low-lifes that add the color. But the story has, as its root, Cherry Pye's destruction from her addiction to pills and alcohol. Call me a prude, but I find the real-life behavior of Brittany, Lindsay and Paris to be pathetic and tragic, rather than funny. Hiaasen's books usually focus on retribution descending on those who are destroying the Everglades. That is a subject I can care about a lot more than I care about flash-in-the-pan rock stars killing themselves with drugs while their dysfunctional parents and hangers-on look the other way.
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