the Scott Stein

I picked up Skinny Dip a few months back because I was curious what all the fuss was about. Carl Hiaasen has a successful newspaper column and movie deals and is a bestselling novelist. The blurbs on the back were effusive in their praise of his comedic writing talent (though I have discussed blurbs here) and I thought I ought to be keeping up with at least some popular authors. So I read it. Skinny Dip is easy to read, no question--I finished in a couple of days. It reminded me of the one Elmore Leonard novel I read, Be Cool, the sequel to Get Shorty, which I know only from the movie (which I did enjoy--the movie, that is). In both cases the villains are so painfully dumb, the heroes so painfully cool, the events largely predictable in their unpredictability, the prose not particularly interesting, the humor lost on me entirely. I felt when reading both of them that the authors were trying really hard to be clever and weren't succeeding nearly as often as they seemed to think they had. And, though these are clearly genre books and perhaps are intended as pure entertainment, they were so devoid of any point or substance, I just couldn't have cared less if any of the characters lived or died.

I also read Big Trouble, by Dave Barry, which was sort of an homage to or a parody of Leonard's style. At first, Barry's novel seemed almost the same as Leonard's. A closer read revealed sentences that were funny in and of themselves as prose, but in terms of story, none of the books mentioned really did anything for me. Maybe I'm not a fan of hardboiled comic detective novels. Maybe someone will point out that these authors have sold millions of books and I haven't. Maybe fans of Leonard and Hiaasen will assure me that the books above are not their best works. I'll have to take their words for it, since I don't plan on reading any more of them. I guess I just don't get it. I do like comic novels (and write them) and have been joyfully discovering P.G. Wodehouse this summer (see here) and enjoy a good hardboiled detective story like those by Dashiell Hammett, though I'm not an avid reader of the latter genre and could certainly be enlightened by some of you about what authors to try. Unlike the Hiaasen and Leonard characters, I was invested in the adventures of Wodehouse's and Hammett's characters and wanted things to work out for them, even though no one would claim that the latter authors (especially Wodehouse) were striving to write anything but an entertaining book.

Note: Book Notes is a regular feature of the Scott Stein, appearing every Wednesday and Friday (I hope) and covering recent and old reads in fiction and nonfiction. They can be found on the main page when new and are archived on the Book Notes page.

9/15/2006 Update: Forget about every Wednesday and Friday. I'll still be posting book notes when the mood strikes, but not on a schedule.


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