‘Girl’ is missing Florida accent

REGIONAL humor, like the regional accent, has suffered in the great American homogenization that occurred in the last half-century or so after World War II.

In fact, genuine regional humor has to be delivered in an authentic accent to work. Think Will Rogers or the comics who honed their shtick along the Catskills’ Borscht Belt. Much of what their subversive comedy represented, like the voices in which it made itself known, has been swept away by the things that have made us one nation -- the GI Bill, the interstate highway system, the electronic mass media, for example. We’re all better because of them, but we’re all probably a little less interesting to ourselves and each other; our collective neuroses now mostly those of the small-difference variety.

The South Florida journalist and bestselling comic novelist Carl Hiaasen has built a successful career and a cult following among other writers with a series of high-velocity slapstick sendups of both hard-boiled crime fiction and his native state’s abuse at the hands of developers and other varieties of bottom-feeding civic boosters. He’s often credited with creating the “eco-thriller,” and his 11th novel, “Nature Girl,” belongs to that sub-category. A Hiaasen novel is populated with characters improbable anywhere but in Florida and who careen into and away from each other at a dizzying speed, producing a glancing sort of friction that lights the spark of social commentary.

In this case, the sequence -- which is a more apt description of what goes on than to refer to it as a plot -- begins with a pair of unfortunate convergences. Sammy Tigertail, a half-Seminole and failed alligator wrestler, finds himself compelled to dispose of a corpse, a tourist who died aboard his air boat while on a quick tour of the Everglades. (Tourists are a crassly malevolent presence in Hiaasen’s fiction, and this one was dumb enough to die of fright after being struck by a venomless snake.) Meanwhile, Boyd Shreave, a smarmy real estate telemarketer in the employ of Relentless Inc., makes the mistake of interrupting the wrong woman’s dinner. She is Honey Santana, the self-proclaimed “queen of lost causes.” Her bipolar disorder is only partly controlled by medication, and she resolves to teach Shreave a lesson by luring him and his minor tabloid-celebrity girlfriend to the Ten Thousand Islands off Florida’s southeast coast. Off they go, followed by Honey’s stalker, a fishmonger and former employer named Louis Piejack, Honey’s ex-con, drug-runner husband, and their rather preposterous 12-year-old son, Fry. They all smash into each other on the appropriately named Dismal Key, where the wretched Tigertail has gone in search of a hermit’s life.

Dismal Key is free of development because, well, it lives up to its name.

There’s a kind of hysterical promise in this mix -- if one of the characters could be induced to do or say or think something surprising, something at odds with their “type.” Unfortunately, they don’t. Here’s Tigertail, forced to pose alongside the drunken tourist, Wilson, who wants to shoot a self-portrait with Indian:

“Sammy Tigertail patiently stood beside him as the man extended one arm, aiming the camera back at them. Sammy Tigertail was wearing a fleece zip-up from Patagonia, a woolen navy watch cap from L.L. Bean and heavy khakis from Eddie Bauer, none of which would be considered traditional Seminole garb. Wilson asked Sammy Tigertail if he had one of those brightly beaded jackets and maybe a pair of deerskin moccasins. The Indian said no.”

Moments later, the man is dead of an apparent heart attack, and Sammy “feared that he would be held responsible for the tourist’s death, and that the tribal authorities wouldn’t be able to protect him from the zeal of Collier County prosecutors, not one of whom was a Native American.”

Right.

When Sammy dumps the body, he calls his uncle Tommy “to say he was going away for a while. He said he wasn’t spiritually equipped to deal with tourists.”

As the old comedy writers would say, a lot of pipe has been laid to get to that joke, and a reader might be entitled to expect the uncle to deliver the punch line: “ ‘Boy, you can’t hide from the white world,’ his uncle told him. ‘I know because I tried.’ ”

OK.

Having lured Shreave and his girlfriend, Eugenie, to the desolate island, and just before events swing even more violently awry, Honey delivers a lecture about her son, whose dinner the telemarketer interrupted: “I’ve tried to teach him to be a decent, positive person -- these days they get so cynical, you know, it breaks your heart. We watch the news together every night because it’s important for young people to be aware of what’s happening, but sometimes, I swear, I want to heave a brick through the television. Don’t you ever feel that way?

“Eugenie said, ‘Not Boyd. He loves his TV.’ ”

The reader can be forgiven for the disturbing thought that the author may not quite know which part of this is funny.

Similarly this: “In truth, it had been a long while since Louis Piejack had thought of his wife in a criminally possessive way. Except when inconvenienced by her illness, he seldom thought of her at all.”

Young Fry’s mental reconciliation with his disturbed and disturbing mother seems ripped whole from Hiaasen’s recent award-winning forays into young-adult fiction: “Her affliction was one of the heart, not the brain. She felt things too deeply and acted on those feelings, and for that there was no known cure. It would explain why all those medicines never worked.”

One of the things missing here is a character who speaks in the accents of one authentic region -- or even of a plausibly invented one. The author has worked as a general assignment and investigative reporter for the Miami Herald and, since 1985, as one of its columnists. Much of this book suggests the influences of both experiences. Had he spent more time as a feature writer, he might have stumbled across the old admonition to “show and not tell.”

Hiaasen can be a bitingly funny writer. His two volumes of selected columns -- “Kick Ass” and “Paradise Screwed” -- are filled with reminders of the Swiftean insight that righteous indignation and humor often make beneficial polemic bedmates. On his personal website, he recommends keeping snakes as household pets: “They’re clean and quiet. You give them rodents and they give you pure, unconditional indifference.”

Now, that’s funny in an edgy sort of way that “Nature Girl” just isn’t, at least not often enough. On the other hand, it does play amusingly enough against the types and conventions of crime fiction to satisfy readers who find their sedentary recreation in that genre.

Maybe that’s just a further testament to the continuing relevance of Sir Donald Wolfit’s famous last words: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

timothy.rutten@latimes.com