Adam Gopnik wrote in the Fiction Issue about a new genre of crime thriller that “may have supplanted the L.A.-noir tradition as a paperback mirror of American manners—the fiction of Florida glare.” American manners indeed: this is a literature in which “ ‘South Florida wackos’—all heavily armed, all loquacious, all barely aware of one another’s existence—blunder through petty crime, discover themselves engaged in actual murder, and then move in unconscious unison toward the black comedy of a violent climax.” The setting, in Gopnik’s words, is “a paradise despoiled,” a land where “ambition, appetite, and an absence of memory lay waste to a once exquisitely delicate environment of wetlands and beaches.”
Gopnik identifies Carl Hiaasen, a Florida native and columnist for the Miami Herald, as a master of the genre. Hiaasen himself labels South Florida “Newark with palm trees,” and churns out tales of sleaze and ruin to match. Yet despite his impressive output, Hiaasen’s dark annals of the Sunshine State cannot best the facts on the ground. Twitter—that first exposer of America’s most embarrassing sinkholes—has served up an aggregated feed of the “Florida Man.” The account, which gathers the police blotter’s sickest and strangest, and feels no need to give commentary, gravely underscores Gopnik’s hypothesis of the South Florida wacko. A few samples:
There’s also an account for Florida Woman, whom Florida Man sometimes retweets:
You would think that the person behind the “Florida Man” feed, a schemer of some paradise of the broad American imagination, was making these up. But a genuine link to a news report is included with each tweet—each more ludicrous, more damaging to the mind’s facility of comprehension, than the next. So what is it about Florida? Hiaasen has characterized the state’s weirdness as “sort of an amiable depravity” and says that “Florida has always been a magnet for outlaws and scoundrels, and sort of a predatory element.”
Seeking more answers, I asked some Floridians why their home state is so warped, and out came privatization, deregulation, severely high rates of AIDS and homicide, fraud, pervasive artificiality, white-collar corruption in the medical-services industry, a swamp without natives, and Rick Scott. “Florida blends country with gaudy neon lights and mouse ears to produce a streamlined but superficial self-image,” a college friend explained. There’s heat, warmth, and a proximity to water that brings together the reckless young with the arthritic elderly, the wellsprings of vigor and possibility alongside those whose fountains are drying up. He also explained that “the state education system is being gutted like a fish,” and spoke of a childhood acquaintance who allegedly smuggles human body parts between Dubai and Miami. Yet another friend mentioned the state’s startling diversity, the Southern specialty of firearm justice, and the peculiarity of manatees, before throwing up his hands. “You ask a tremendous question,” he wrote, “one that I have thought about ever since I attained self-awareness around sophomore year of high school and one that has refused to yield its secrets. Florida fever is a mystery so large I cannot see past it.”
That last friend wasn’t the only responder to my thought experiment who numbered his theories, an attempt to impose order where there is none. In the noir of Los Angeles, Gopnik postulates, there is a logic that connects disparate elements, but in Florida we have only illogic—the sheer randomness of coincidence. Florida may be our greedy nation’s inferno, where—Gopnik again—“rotating groups of creeps and crooks, pursuing their own greedy ends, bounce into and off one another brutally and unintentionally, billiard balls on a worn green baize.” It’s that randomness that grabs our national curiosity by the throat and won’t let us go. Maybe this is why some of us can’t get enough of “Florida Man”: we never know what hysterical and horrible weirdness is coming next.
Illustration by Leslie Herman.
