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Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy

This is a massive, probably epoch-making exhibition, but which I found troubling and repelling for reasons I’ll try to explain later, in part 2 of this review. First I’ll try to give you all the information and as many images as I can so that you can make your own mind up.

Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall is, according to the curators at the Royal Academy, ‘America’s most important artist‘.

This huge exhibition of Marshall’s enormous paintings at the Royal Academy is the largest ever held outside the US and so the first chance for most of us Brits to experience his works in the UK.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition includes 70 works, primarily paintings, as well as examples of the artist’s prints, drawings and sculpture, from museums and private collections across North America and Europe.

It includes a dramatic new series of paintings made especially for the show.

The show marks Marshall’s 70th birthday (born 17 October 1955).

Marshall works in series and cycles. The exhibition brings together 11 groups of works made between 1980 and the present, displayed in 11 galleries.

For your information I’ll give the curators’ wall labels to each of the 11 rooms verbatim, distinguished from my commentary by being indented.

Gallery 1. The Academy

The works in this room feature scenes from art schools, studios and museums – places, like the Royal Academy, where artists study, create and exhibit their work. There is a deep fascination in Western art with the studio as the locus of production and the museum as the repository of wonders. Adding to this tradition, Marshall transforms it by centring Black figures as both producers and consumers.

The painters he depicts are masters of their medium and materials. The model in ‘The Academy’ strikes a pose reminiscent of the American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games. On the student painter’s table there is a preparatory sketch of the model as well as a ‘nkisi nkondi’ ‘power figure’. In ‘Untitled (Studio)’, a painter adjusts the position of her model to match the picture in progress.

Untitled by Kerry James Marshall (2009) Yale University Art Gallery © Kerry James Marshall

These works emphasise the decisions artists make in composing and completing their work: whether to paint precisely or loosely, whether to render objects flatly or with more volume, and how to arrange colours. Marshall uses various black pigments to depict skin colours, layering, or placing side by side, ivory black, Mars black and carbon black, mixing in other colours to render black fully chromatic. As he has said, ‘if you say black, you should see black’. While his blacks are complex, Marshall rarely attempts to depict the browns of real skin tones. His figures are at once individual characters and examples of an emphatic Blackness, real and rhetorical, and as such, provoke wider questions about the idea of Black figures in art.

The Academy by Kerry James Marshall (2012) Collection of Dr. Daniel S. Berger © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Gallery 2. Invisible Man

Marshall’s family moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles in 1963. In 1965 he visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a school trip. In 1968 he was selected for a summer drawing workshop at the Otis Art Institute, where he first encountered the work of Charles White and committed to becoming a full-time student there after high school. He enrolled at Otis in 1977 and received his BFA in 1978.

The 1970s was a volatile period at Otis, and within the art world in general. Conceptual artists were abandoning painting; some artists associated with the Black Arts Movement were distancing themselves from European art traditions and devoting themselves to political works aimed at uplift and protest.

Not to be deterred, Marshall continued his pursuit of an education dedicated to maximising the knowledge and skills associated with the best results in picture making. When the time was right, these could be put to effective use. That time arrived after he read Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel ‘Invisible Man’. In the novel, the protagonist feels he is invisible because he is not seen as desirable in American society. This idea inspired Marshall to begin a series of works in which Black figures are set against a dark ground, so that they become almost invisible to the viewer. The first of these was made with egg tempera, a medium strongly associated with Sienese painters like Duccio, and later revised by artists like Ben Shahn.

In this first major cycle of images, Marshall also explored histories of racial stereotypes and caricatures, choosing to render his figures in black paint. From this point on, his figures function rhetorically, raising questions about Black absence and presence both in society and in art history.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing two of the invisible man paintings – if you look closely you can see the white teeth and white eyes of the invisible man (photo by the author)

Gallery 3. The Painting of Modern Life 1

The two largest galleries are devoted to Marshall’s ambitiously composed, large-format paintings that record scenes of everyday life in Black America.

In the nineteenth century, French artists like Édouard Manet and Georges Seurat transformed the genre of history painting to render scenes of modern life on an epic scale. Made on unstretched canvases and secured to the wall with grommets, the paintings in this room date from the early to mid-1990s, when Marshall, having relocated to Chicago and settled into a studio, began to make his own paintings of everyday life: children playing, lovers dancing, families enjoying a day in the park.

‘De Style’ (1993), showing a group of Black men in a barber’s shop, was the first work of Marshall’s to be acquired by a museum, and is both an amalgamation of established art historical styles and a monument to Black style.

De Style by Kerry James Marshall (1993) Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

A year after completing it, Marshall embarked on the works in his ‘Garden Project’ series, three of which are shown here. These look back to the American public housing projects named ‘Gardens’ whose first residents included families, like Marshall’s own, who had migrated from the South and settled in the north and west of the United States from the 1940s. Made at a time when many housing projects were suffering from a lack of resources, the images convey the hopes of the past and the resilience of residents in the 1990s.

OR:

Deeply influenced by artists such as Edouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Georges Seurat and other painters of modern life, and conscious of the absence of large-scale images of daily life in the work of many Black artists before him, Marshall depicts Black families picnicking in the park, lovers dancing, children playing in communal gardens, and friends hanging out in hair salons, for example in School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012 (Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham (AL)).

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing three of the Garden Project paintings (photo by the author)

At the centre of this room hangs the vast Knowledge and Wonder, 1995 (Legler Regional Library, Chicago Public Library, Chicago), Marshall’s largest painting to date, exhibited for the first time outside of Chicago.

Knowledge and Wonder by Kerry James Marshall (1995) City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago Public Library, Legler Regional Library © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: Patrick L. Pyszka, City of Chicago

Gallery 4. Middle Passage

The five paintings in this room were made in the early 1990s and constitute Marshall’s first attempt to address the history of the Middle Passage – the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, during which many captive Africans died before reaching the slave markets in the Americas. It is a history understood in fragments, and accordingly, instead of making works functioning like costume dramas, Marshall composes paintings with disparate images, motifs and textures, incorporating symbols and diagrams derived from Yoruban religion, Voodoo and other syncretic religions that were practised across the African diaspora as acts of defiance as well as to maintain connections to Africa.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing Great America (left) and Plunge (right) (photo by the author)

Before embarking on the series, Marshall completed a group of woodblock prints called ‘African Powers’, imagining six Yoruban orishas – divine spirits or gods.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing the six African Powers woodblock prints (photo by the author)

He had also recently worked as the production designer on Julie Dash’s film ‘Daughters of the Dust’ (1991), for which he constructed sets including bottle trees and grave markers that were derived from African religious traditions. The dream-like structure of the film has an affinity with some of the paintings here.

A section bringing together imagined portraits of historically significant Black figures such as Scipio Moorhead and Harriet Tubman, question how historical portraits can be created in the absence of archives and earlier representations of individuals.

Gallery 6. Vignettes

For Marshall, every historical genre and style of painting is ripe for reinvention, and in a long-running open series he has looked back to romance pictures, challenging himself to make serious and layered paintings with apparently light-hearted subject matter. The first ‘Vignette’, dating from 2003, was a landscape in the manner of Henri Rousseau set in an American park, showing a naked couple wearing jewellery related to the Afrocentric movement. In the later ‘Vignettes’, Marshall reworked the compositions of French Rococo artists like Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

By painting romantic scenes, Marshall produces images of resistance. ‘Breeding’, not marriage, was encouraged by some slave owners as a way of increasing their wealth and workforce.

Vignette #13 by Kerry James Marshall (2008) Susan Manilow Collection © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Although the paintings are filled with flowers and lovebirds, the various scenes are marked in other ways by signs of protest, including burning tyres and political flags. Surrounded by pink brushstrokes and presented as dream scenes, the works also raise the question of whether Black couples can really relax in public spaces or if this idea remains an illusion.

Central Hall. Souvenirs

In 1998, Marshall produced a suite of paintings, photographs, sculpture, prints and video for the exhibition ‘Mementos’ at the Renaissance Society in Chicago – four paintings are reunited here for the first time since their debut. The paintings are set in the middle-class houses of Marshall’s friends and relatives. One is the house of his mother-in-law. Decorations in their living rooms included tributes to the assassinated Kennedys and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The works concern the ways in which the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, marked by unfulfilled optimism and political upheaval, might be commemorated in the 1990s.

Of the four large horizontal-format paintings in the group, the first two, in full colour, memorialise political and activist martyrs, who are silkscreened as a frieze across the top. The other pictures, rendered in grisaille, expand the tribute to recognise the importance of cultural heroes who died between 1959 and 1970, bracketing the 1960s. As well as thinking about glittery greetings cards, Marshall wanted to transform the genre of Renaissance Annunciation paintings, where the archangel Gabriel appears in Mary’s home to tell her she will give birth to Jesus. The angels in these paintings call on us to remember. They appear somewhat exhausted by the process of assessing the unrealised dreams or real achievements of these political protagonists and cultural heroes.

Lecture Room. The Painting of Modern Life 2

In the 2010s Marshall continued to construct powerful scenes of everyday life. The settings were parks, nightclubs, homes, city streets and art galleries. He often reworked arrangements and elements from famous paintings, none more prominently than when he transformed the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ (1533) into a distorted Sleeping Beauty, disturbing the space of a salon in ‘School of Beauty, School of Culture’, a sister work to his earlier barber’s shop painting ‘De Style’.

School of Beauty, School of Culture by Kerry James Marshall (2012) Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Sean Pathasema

Some paintings here refer to specific moments from the past, such as the crowning of Gloria Smith as the second Miss Black America at the height of the ‘Black Is Beautiful’ period in 1969.

Others provoke questions about Marshall’s own time: ‘Untitled (Policeman)’ (2015) was made shortly after the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement when protesters campaigned to ‘defund the police’. Together, these paintings express a wide range of Black experiences of and attitudes towards America, from deep joy to a profound, uneasy ambivalence.

Untitled (Policeman) by Kerry James Marshall (2015) The Museum of Modern Art, New York © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Gallery 7. Africa Revisited

Made specifically for this exhibition, the paintings here concern challenging moments in the recorded history of Africa, not often represented by artists. Five of them address the slave trade, showing people kidnapping children, rowing captives in a canoe to buyers out of scene, returning with all kinds of booty, and celebrating their successful trades. As with his previous works, several of these new paintings present confident Black people acting with agency. These figures are shown having sold slaves, driven by their greed for the consumer goods that Europeans supplied in exchange. Another painting depicts the murder of Shaka Zulu by his half-brothers in Zululand in 1828. Together, these paintings disrupt a view of the African past, providing a fuller picture of a complex history.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing three of the Africa Revisited paintings (photo by the author)

Two final paintings depict the so-called ‘white queens’ of Africa, Colette Hubert and Ruth Williams, at their weddings to Léopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, and Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana. These scenes, showing real unions but with the details reimagined by Marshall, disturb narratives about the post-colonial period on the continent.

Gallery 8. Wake / Gulf Stream

Marshall first showed these two works together in 2003 at the Venice Biennale.

‘Wake’ centres on a black ship on a pedestal that stands for a black sea. While recalling the journey made by enslaved Africans, the work also suggests the growing power of Black cultural expression. Each time it is displayed, Marshall adds more medallions, representing the proliferating achievements of African Americans. The idea of accumulation comes from the ‘nkisi nkondi’, a type of Kongo ‘power figure’ into which users drove iron nails to increase its spiritual potency.

The painting ‘Gulf Stream’ was shown in front of ‘Wake’ in Venice. In it, Marshall revisits a painting by the American artist Winslow Homer, also called ‘The Gulf Stream’ (1899/1906), which featured a shipwrecked Black sailor whose boat is surrounded by sharks. Set off the coast of America in the present day, the friends in Marshall’s yacht here appear to be enjoying their day sailing, but storm clouds are visible on the horizon, indicative of unpredictable times ahead.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing Wake (the sculpture on the floor) and Gulf Stream (the painting on the wall) (photo by the author)

‘Wake’ also encompasses ‘black light’ photographs of a slave ship, and plates commemorating the first cargo of twenty Africans brought to America, as well as one for William Tucker, the first person of African origin born in America in around 1624. Marshall represents Tucker with a photograph of himself as a teenager.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing the plate from wake commemorating William Tucker but bearing a photo of the artist as a teenager (photo by the author)

Gallery 9. Red Black Green

In the works gathered here, Marshall deploys the colours of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) or Pan-African Flag, created by Marcus Garvey in 1920, as well as the imagery and slogans of the Black Panthers from the late 1960s. But rather than straightforwardly celebrating Black Nationalism, Marshall constructs cheeky and layered works that also reference the connected histories of painting and erotica. Artists from Titian to Goya and Manet made famous canvases of reclining nudes. Marshall exchanges their female figures for a Black man who hides his genitals with a flag. Similarly, struck by the lack of Black women in American pin-up magazines, Marshall decided to make his own images.

One of his imagined models here becomes a ‘Black Star’. The painting also references the ‘Black Star Line’ – the shipping company that Marcus Garvey founded in 1919 to encourage commerce with Africa and the voluntary return of Black Americans to the continent. Gripping a star like a ship’s wheel, the woman here looks back like a model in a photoshoot. We are left to ask whether Garvey’s creations are now just useful for making stylish and sexy images, or if his political project remains relevant today.

Pros

1. Visitors The friend I went with pointed out that an unusually large number of the exhibition visitors were Black, and also young. This was noticeable because, no matter how much galleries go on about diversity and inclusivity, most of the exhibitions I go to have few if any Black visitors and are overwhelmingly populated with old white people. So this is Success if you’re trying to attract a younger, more diverse audience.

2. Black art She went on to say that if you’re a little Black girl or boy, and interested in art and go to galleries, it must be alienating or dismaying to see nothing but white faces in all the art works. You might end up feeling art is a White activity for White people. Whereas Marshall’s works clearly rectify that notion and would make you feel that art can very much be a Black interest and activity, after all.

3. Black presence The size of the paintings, their confident mix of classical examples with modern subject matter, their sweeping range over Black history from the dawn of slavery through key moments of American history, up to his numerous portrayals of everyday life in Black communities – all these triumphantly achieve his goal of restoring and emphasising a Black presence in art. So it’s a triumph.

But do you actually like any of it?

That said, she didn’t actually like any of the paintings on display. Usually we play a game of getting to the end of an exhibition, having read all the wall captions and absorbed all the information – then stroll back through the show selecting one key work from each room, and explaining why we like it more than the others.

But in this huge show neither of us saw any one work we liked in any of the rooms (with the possible exception of the six African Powers woodcuts, which I liked, up to a point). Neither of us chose any of the vast paintings because we didn’t really like any of them. We didn’t really enjoy looking at Marshall’s art. Big, colourful, striking, and in a good cause, sure, but…

So I get the point of the works, and they certainly succeed in fulfilling Marshall’s aims and agenda. But I felt alienated and outside all of them. Why? I think it’s for three reasons.

1. Blackness

It’s no use denying that the paintings’ insistence on Black Black Black was a problem for me for the simple reason that I am not Black. I don’t object or dislike the Blackness, I just don’t feel included. It feels like it’s for a different audience than me, which is fine, but explains why I didn’t feel engaged.

What puzzles me is that I really like specifically Black art. The London art gallery devoted to Black art, Autograph ABP, is one of my favourite galleries, and I go out of my way to review its shows. I absolutely loved shows there by:

Wilfred Ukpong: Niger-Delta / Future-Cosmos (March 2024)
Omar Victor Diop – Liberty / Diaspora (November 2018)

To name a couple which really stick in my mind. I really liked Mary Sibande‘s brilliant show at Somerset House and who could forget the great Basquiat exhibition at Barbican? And I’ve really liked all the Afro-Futurism things I’ve seen, for example at the Barbican’s science fiction exhibition. So it’s not Black people or Black culture or Black art which troubled me, it’s something else.

2. American cultural imperialism

A big part of my abreaction is because it’s so American. In my opinion, British culture is super-saturated with American cultural products. In my youth we were exposed to a fair amount of Hollywood movies and TV shows, but this has now gone supersize with the explosion of streaming services, Disney, Netflix, Apple TV, HBO and hundreds of others. Then there’s the entire internet itself with its inbuilt bias towards American products and the American worldview. And then there’s American smartphones and social media which most people have willingly invited into their homes to record every aspect of their lives. And now we are about to be taken over by American artificial intelligence getting to know us better than we know ourselves.

In my opinion, the super-saturation of British culture with American products, ideas, technology and discourse ought to be resisted.

Instead of which British cultural curators and gatekeepers fall over themselves to promote American art and culture and movies and TV shows at every opportunity.

And, disappointingly, the same goes for academia where what used to be called Critical Theory has been superseded by various forms of identity theories (feminist theory, queer theory, Black theory, post-colonial theory) almost all imported from America, led by American academics (I was watching a video about Judith Butler recently, queen of Queer Theory) who speak to specifically American history and circumstances.

In my opinion this has two distinct negative consequences:

a) American culture swamps and obliterates British culture

The actual social and political and cultural situation of my country, England, gets swamped and lost in products, discourse and rhetoric which is and sounds American and stems from American history and politics.

So when I see yet another image of Martin Luther King or John fucking Kennedy, I just think, Fuck off. That’s your country, your history, your politics, your problems, you deal with them. I have my own country with its own history, politics and problems to deal with thank you very much.

b) Importing American culture means importing American politics

But there is a horrible historical inevitability here as well. In terms of social and cultural trends, America has often been seen as ahead of Europe; in some sense, America has often been seen as the future. So what do all these social, political and cultural trends get us? What is the shiny hi-tech America which British cultural guardians fall over themselves to promote, with its fabulous Oscars and Taylor Swift and woke activists, heading towards?

Donald Trump. Taken together, all the efforts of American feminists, queer and Black activists have ended up, through the mad irrationality of human society, handing power to an authoritarian moron and his henchmen. Fifty years of earnest American feminism has led up to… the revocation of Roe versus Wade and the ending of the nationwide right to abortion. All the Black Lives Matter calls to defund the police have ended up with… augmented powers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forces which now roam the streets like a semi-fascist militia, kidnapping and deporting people at will.

In other words, so many of these progressive causes in America, in the unique context of American history, politics, culture and society, have not only failed but triggered a huge and horrifying backlash.

My position is simple: I think of myself as left-wing. I support a woman’s right to abortion, I support LGBTQ+ rights, I sympathise with Black activists’ opposition to police brutality, and so on.

But I greatly fear that the wholesale importation of American cultural and political models and discourse into Britain risks triggering exactly the same white, heteronormative, masculine backlash here as has happened in the States, the followers of the new martyr Charlie Kirk. Why would we want to import the hugely conflicted culture wars which have brought America to the brink of some kind of civil war, into our own society?

And in fact it’s happening already. The rise and rise of Reform at the expense of the feeble Labour Party mirrors the rise of Trump’s MAGA movement within the Republican Party at the expense of the feeble Democrats.

It may seem grotesquely unfair to associate Kerry James Marshall with the rise of Donald Trump. All I’m saying is they both come from the same toxic culture. When I saw the images of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy I not only experienced a vast weariness with American pop history, but a premonition of how this all ends up.

I don’t want Reform, I don’t want the Conservative Party to adopt the tone and policies of Trump’s MAGA, and, in my opinion, one way to resist the rise of America-style authoritarianism is to insist on the difference between America and Britain. To insist on the specific Britishness of British social and political issues. To stop kowtowing before American cultural products and importing American discourse, with all its toxic resonances, into British culture.

3. The new figurativism

But just as impactful as all the above was that I was dismayed by the style of all these paintings, namely a return to a kind of naive realism, which I found dismaying. In the RA shop was a big expensive book about The New Figurativism. According to Google AI:

The new figurativism refers to the modern resurgence of figurative art, or art depicting recognizable subjects like people, in contemporary times, driven by a desire for greater artistic representation, a reflection of 21st-century realities, and a break from abstract art’s dominance. This movement allows for the exploration of social and personal identity, particularly for traditionally marginalized groups, and features bold, expressive styles often inspired by past movements like Neo-Expressionism.

Return to Representation: It marks a shift back to depicting the human form and recognizable scenes after a long period where abstract art was dominant.

Emphasis on Representation and Identity: A major driving force is a need for greater diversity and the ability to tell authentic stories from various perspectives, including those of people of colour, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Relevance to Current Reality: The genre’s ability to capture and reflect the contemporary world makes it a potent tool for addressing social issues, expressing personal experiences, and engaging with contemporary culture.

Opportunity for Authenticity: It provides a powerful platform for artists to tell their own stories and to represent their communities in a way that abstract art cannot.

So on this definition, Marshall’s work is a prime example of the New Figurativism, both in style and very much in purpose, namely ‘to tell authentic stories from various perspectives, including those of people of colour’, in his concern to ‘represent his community’ and so on. As the Royal Academy curators put it, Marshall certainly:

makes visible those people who were so noticeably absent in the works that came before him.

But to [put my concerns in a nutshell, what is happening here is that woke political concerns are justifying a return to a deeply conservative, retro, anti-modern style of figurative painting. There are a few stylistic glitches and angularities which feebly gesture to the great innovations of the modernists a hundred years ago. But overall, it feels as if most of twentieth century art never happened.

I’ve just visited the van Gogh / Anselm Kiefer exhibition which is also playing here at the Royal Academy. I was thrilled by watching van Gogh develop his visual language and evolve his deployment of oil paint on an almost week-by-week basis; and dazzled at the enormous, thrilling innovations of Kiefer’s huge canvases clotted with surface detritus, stalks and twigs.

Coming from those thrilling and mind-opening innovations to Marshall’s deeply conservative, old-style, backward-looking figurativism felt like a big, big imaginative letdown.

Conclusion

As I said back at the start, Marshall’s art perfectly achieves his stated aim of putting the Black presence front and centre of his work, which has been enthusiastically taken up by galleries and commissions across the States and, I bet, will open doors for Black kids and teenagers and aspiring artists and just sympathetic gallery goers, to realise that they can do this, too, and that they have a voice and presence in the sometimes intimidating realm of ‘Art’. In terms of cultural politics it is an enormous success.

But in terms of actual aesthetics, of the style and value of what you actually see, I feel Marshall’s art represents an enormous step backwards, to a naively realist approach which erases everything I love and value about modern art.

So that’s the fundamental reason why I really didn’t like this exhibition.

Coda: Kerry Marshall and David Hockney

To take the race element out of the equation altogether, I feel the same when I look at David Hockney’s works from last 20 years or so. In the RA shop, next to a book about New Figurativism and umpteen books about Marshall, was a pile of books and merch celebrating Hockney’s dayglo renderings of the Yorkshire Wolds.

I flicked through one particularly enormous coffee table book and was staggered at how many there are, hundreds and hundreds of huge, vivid, simplistic pictures, I wonder if he’s done over a thousand by now, rattling them off on his ipad.

And as I flicked dispiritedly on, I thought: It’s as if the last 100 years or artistic experimentation never happened. A guy with a great eye and a love of bright colours is creating a never-ending stream of entertaining, easy-on-the-eye figurative paintings of a subject he loves; in Hockney’s case, the landscape of his beloved Yorkshire, in Marshall’s case, Black people, history, art and so on – and in both cases I can see that they’re big [both artists produce very big paintings, which is another rather dismaying aspect of contemporary art], bright and confident but… I just don’t like them.

And found myself thinking that this is anodyne, easy-on-the-eye, deeply reactionary, backward-looking anti-art, an art appropriate for an age which has lost any belief in the future and looks back to multiple pasts with a kind of crippling nostalgia, in both content and style.

Untitled (Porch Deck) by Kerry James Marshall (2014) Kravis Collection © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London

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Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen (2020)

The purpling corpse of Uric Burns still hung from the bridge abutment. Photographers clambered around like coked-up marmosets.
(Squeeze Me, page 186)

I suspect that the outstanding feature of this novel was intended to be the extended mockery of President Donald Trump and the First Lady, Melania Trump, who both appear as speaking characters, not actually named, but unmistakable nonetheless – the former blustering at press conferences or failing to get an erection with his mistress, the latter relieving the boredom of her gilded cage by having an affair with her Secret Service bodyguard, on one memorable occasion emerging dripping naked from her bath and ordering him to **** her.

However, two things militate against the book being quite the excoriating sensation Hiaasen and his editors may have planned:

Trump has finally gone, as of January 2021, and it’s surprising – but then again, maybe not – how quickly we’ve stopped giving a damn about him and, therefore, this book has lost its satirical charge.
Trump has quickly been trumped by the small matter of a worldwide pandemic which has rocked every aspect of our societies, and shows no signs of going away.

Presumably Hiaasen was putting the finishing touches to this novel in spring 2020 when the pandemic first arrived. He’s been canny enough to slip references to it into the narrative but it doesn’t affect the plot at all; indeed, it would be difficult to see how you could have a comedy thriller set during a lockdown. But somehow even the fleeting references to COVID (pages 8, 29, 56, 105) are enough to drag the reader out of Hiaasen’s grotesque fantasy-land and into our all-too-real present. They undermine the satire.

Plot summary

As usual, as soon as she opens a Hiaasen novel the reader is bombarded with a host of characters, each with their own complex backstories and history, who are brought together by a premise, by one specific incident, the more garish and grotesque the better, whose ramifications rumble on and spread out and ensnare everyone in comic (and sometimes very violent) consequences for just shy of 400 pages.

Angie Armstrong

Angela ‘Angie’ Armstrong runs a wild animal control company ‘Discreet Captures’ i.e. if you’ve got a wild raccoon in your kitchen or a bear blunders into your garden, Angie’s the woman you call to sort it out. She’s five foot three tall and her Army father taught her to address all males as ‘sir’. She was married for a while to Dustin, 21 years older and a good-looking life coach (p.44). However, Dustin didn’t like critters at all, which put a strain on the marriage, then Angie caught him being unfaithful (as happens in most Hiaasen marriages), in this case with an equestrian named Alexandria, so Angie divorced him. She still keeps in touch with Dustin’s son, grown-up, reasonable Joel, who comes to stay every other weekend. Angie’s latest boyfriend is a Merrill Lynch banker named Jesse, who gets casually dumped fairly early on in the story (p.106).

Angie got a job as a wildlife officer with the state of Florida but blew this when out on patrol she saw a drunken slob deliberately run his airboat over a grazing deer. Angie motored straight over and arrested the man, who she refers to as ‘the fuckstick’ (p.37). The fuckstick made the mistake of continuing to insult and abuse her so intensely that she fed his left arm into the maw of a tame alligator named Lola. Yes. Extreme. Angie takes no shit from anyone.

The case went to court where she learned the fuckstick’s name was Pruitt. He was fined but Angie herself was sent to Gadsden prison for 14 months for use of excessive force, and discharged from state service ie lost her job. Now, every day at 6pm, Pruitt phones up from a different payphone and breathes revolting threats and abuse down the phone. Angie gives sardonic replies and drives him mad by never losing her temper and referring to him as ‘sir’ throughout.

Angie is, in other words, the latest in a line of tough Hiaasen heroines such as Merry Mansfield in Razor Girl, Honey Santana in Nature Girl, Jolayne Lucks in Lucky You or Erin in Strip Tease.

The Burmese python

Late one night Angie gets a call from Tripp Teabull, manager of the Lipid Estate in Palm Beach. This is a huge mansion complete with ballroom, manicured grounds and ornamental lake where very up-scale parties, receptions and fund raisers are held. Costs quarter of a million to hire for the night without catering.

Teabull is calling because the head gardener, Mauricio, and his crew have discovered an eighteen-foot-long Burmese python lazing in the branches of one of the trees in the grounds with a big lump half way down it. As so often, Hiaasen pauses the narrative for a few pages to give a background explanation of an aspect of his novel, in this case the genuine proliferation of Burmese pythons in South Florida: they were originally bought as pets but managed to escape into the wild, whose tropical climate suits them perfectly.

The novel opens on the night of a big right-wing political fundraiser being given at the Lipid Estate and attended by the usual set of South Florida millionaires, their wives and widows. It opens just at the moment when one of a circle of rich widows, 72-year-old Katherine ‘Kiki’ Pew Fitzsimmons has gone missing, leaving only a cocktail glass and one shoe down by the lake.

Little old lady missing? Huge python with a suggestive bulge in its gut? You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to instantly suspect the two are connected.

So Angie is called out to the Estate and charged with getting rid of the python without using a gun or anything which might scare the super-rich guests up in the main house. After some faffing she decapitates the python with a razor sharp machete and gets some of the estate’s bigger guys to roll it up into a coil, stuff it into a box along with ice, put the head in a separate (smaller) box, and carry them to her pickup truck.

Then she drives it to the storage units (Safe’n’Sound) where she stores dead animals on ice before she’s got enough to make a full load and it’s worth driving a hundred miles west into the wilderness where she’s developed a secret burial ground for them. More respectful, and causes less questions, than just dumping them in the garbage.

Uric and the Prince

Job done, right? However, shortly afterwards Angie’s apartment is burglarised, the crims taking her checkbook and laptop. This, we discover, is at the behest of none other than Teabull, the Lipid Estate manager. Terrified that the python really ate the old millionairess Kiki, he wants to totally get rid of the evidence and so commissioned a couple of lowlifes, Uric Burns, and his assistant, ‘a dull-eyed fuckwit’ (p.48) who insists on being called Prince Paladin (real name is Keever Bracco, p.83) to find out where Angie stores her dead animals and to steal back the python corpse and safely dispose of it where cops will never find it.

These two dumb gimps stole Angie’s laptop in order to find out what storage depot Angie uses, in order to break into that and steal the python, but they are so immensely dim that after driving round all night, they report right back to the Lipid estate to ask Teabull where to take it. The latter is understandably furious since the whole purpose of the heist was to remove the snake as far as humanly possible from the Lipid Estate and here they are, having brought it right back and risking maximum incrimination!

Teabull hurriedly gives the crooks details of a new construction site going up out west, which is still having the foundations laid, with big holes being filled with cement. Teabull pulls a favour with the site foreman, Jackson, buying his crew lunch at a local restaurant so that the site is empty at just the right time for Uric and the Prince to rock up and excavate a hole in the soggy cement. But when they open the boot to bury the snake they find it has thoroughly defrosted and not only that, it has kind of unzipped to reveal a little old lady folded up inside its gut. After they’ve stopped throwing up, the pair bury the lady in the hole in the concrete but there isn’t time to find a new bit of fresh cement and dig a hole in it, before the crew start arriving back from lunch so the two dimwits drive off at speed with a decomposing python in their boot.

However, there’s a detail. Uric is quicker to stop leaning away and throwing up when they first open the boot than his accomplice Prince Paladin and so spots that the decaying lady is wearing big diamond earrings and a necklace of conch pearls. He grabs them while the Prince is still puking. But in trying to get the pearl necklace off, Uric snaps it and a number of pearls roll free into the boot.

Second unfortunate thing is that, when the crims drive off at speed they, hit one of those railway lines crossing the road and embedded in it, which gives the car enough of a big bump to spring the boot open with the result that the snake corpse goes flying out along with some of the incriminating pearls…

Fay Riptoad

Back to Kiki’s rich friends. It is a minor riff but quite funny the way Hiaasen characterises the really rich whose circle old Kiki inhabited by showing that everyone belongs to this or that eminent family the source of whose wealth is humorously signposted along with their surname. Thus Kiki was the grand-daughter of Dallas Austin Pew ‘of the aerosol Pews’; her first husband was Huff Cornbright, ‘of the anti-freeze and real estate Cornbrights’; after Huff drowned while fishing, she remarried Mott Fitzsimmons ‘of the asbestos and textile Fitzsimmonses’; and she is good friends with Fay Alex Riptoad ‘of the compost and iron ore Riptoads’. (The same gag is repeated again on page 122).

This latter lady, Fay Alex, is head of the POTUS Pussies, shrill ageing cheerleaders for ‘the new, crude-spoken commander-in-chief’ (p.8). Being tremendously bossy, on the night Kiki goes missing, Fay takes it on herself to phone and summon the local Palm Beach chief of police, Jerry Crosby (backstory p.53) and insisting that he drop everything to search for her missing friend. Luckily Jerry has developed ample skills at handling the very rich without losing his temper.

Enter the First Lady

Now, I hear you ask, where does the president’s wife come into all this? Well, she is travelling in the usual ten-car motorcade from the president’s residence, the ironically named Casa Bellicosa, when it draws to a halt because the car in front has come across a decapitated python lying across the road. Yep, the First Lady’s motorcade has come across the very same snake corpse which flew out the boot as Uric and the Prince fled the building site where they’d buried Kiki only a few minutes earlier.

In other words, Tripp Teabull wanted the python disposed of as discreetly as possible but instead, due to Uric’s incompetence, it has come to the attention of the President’s wife and the US Secret Service.

The president’s wife’s bodyguards and secret agents swarm everywhere talking into their lapel radios like they do in the movies, before establishing it’s just a weird coincidence rather than some kind of terrorist threat. But one thing leads to another and the security forces identify Angie Armstrong as a leading animal wrangler in the locality. With the result that the Secret Service calls her in to deal with the snake corpse and she is, understandably puzzled, that she is dealing with the very snake corpse she had safely stashed in the storage depot a day earlier. At this point she tells the authorities all about how her apartment was burgled and then her storage area broken into and the snake being stolen, and they all ask themselves: Why?

So this is how Angie finds herself being interviewed by Special Agent Paul Ryskamp, who’s tasked by the Feds with following up on the weird incident which delayed the First Lady’s motorcade. He’s a nice guy. She’s a nice girl. Can you see where this is heading?

Diego Beltrán

So far, so macabre and gruesome and satirical. Things take a notably more serious turn when we discover that on the very same night that a drunk, stoned Kiki was eaten by a giant python, a small people smuggling boat hit the beach not far away, carrying illegal immigrants from Central America including one Diego Beltrán who is to become a dominant figure in the narrative.

As it happens, Diego has already been resident in the States where he had a visa to stay while he completed a degree, so he’s well educated and fluent in English and duly returned to his native Honduras. But life didn’t work out back home, so now here he is, having paid to be smuggled back into the States, along with 20 other illegals.

After they’re dumped on the beach, the passengers all split up. Diego is tramping along a highway when he discovers, at the place a rail line crosses it, something gleaming down in the groove of the track and picks up a shiny conch pearl, obviously one of the pearls from Kiki’s necklace. It is a fateful moment.

Diego goes on to get a low-paid manual job but a few days later is picked up in a sweep by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When he’s taken to the police station and turns out his pockets, everyone sees the conch pearl. It is listed and reported, and this triggers a match with missing person Kiki Fitzsimmons, who is reported as last seen wearing diamond earrings and a conch pearl necklace.

So before he knows it, Diego has been accused by the cops of murdering Kiki. Not only that but, because the python corpse held up the First Lady’s motorcade, the FBI get involved, too. Not only that, but the name of this suspect and the fact that he’s an illegal have been quickly gathered by the poisonous Fay Riptoad and passed on, via her close contacts, to the dim, racist, know-nothing, knee-jerk ‘commander in chief’ and, to the horror of all the good reasonable people in the book (namely Angie, local police chief Jerry Crosby and Paul Ryskamp) the C-in-C delivers an ad lib speech from his golf course, where he singles out the murder of his ‘good friend’ Kiki Fitzsimmons by illegal immigrant Diego Beltrán as just the kind of dire threat from foreigners and criminals which America is facing. ‘That’s why we gotta build a wall, folks, to keep these murderers and rapists out of our beautiful country’ etc.

Within hours an angry mob of C-in-C supporters has assembled outside the Palm Beach County jailhouse where Diego is being held, egged on by right-wing talk-show radio hosts, demanding his immediate lynching or hanging. His name is quickly converted into a slogan chanted by the mob and repeated in the media: ‘No More Diegos!’

This barely needs any commentary. It is intended to be scalding satire on the stupidity and bigoted xenophobia of the moronic president and his base.

Uric and the Prince are identified

Angie, Jerry and Paul had each in their ways been quietly following up on identifying the crooks who burgled Angie and stole the python. They have got as far as identifying Uric and the Prince Paladin aka Keever Bracco from various photos and CCTV footage.

Now there is a further plot development because, when a reward is offered for any news about Kiki, not too bright Uric decides he’ll claim it, so he calls the anonymous crime hotline and reveals where the body of Kiki is buried in the recently laid concrete of a new housing development and also accuses the Prince of carrying out the crime.

When Kiki’s body is then found, it confirms Uric’s story, and closed circuit TV from the site confirms the make of car the crims used, and also shows it driving off at speed. A related camera at the railway crossing shows clear as day how this same car momentarily jumped into the air as it hit the rail bump, the boot flew open and a massive snake corpse flew out.

The good guys form a team

Angie is the link between Jerry the police chief and Paul the FBI agent and by about page 200 she invites them both to a bar for a meal where they meet and form a kind of team. By now they have pretty much all the evidence they need to piece together the sequence of events:

python swallows Kiki
Angie kills python and takes it to storage on ice
Teabull commissions Uric and the Prince to break into Angie’s apartment, find the name of the storage site, break into that and steal the python
they go to bury it at the building site but discover Kiki’s body inside the snake, bury that and run out of time to dig a separate body for the snake so drive off at speed
when they hit the rail line the boot flies open and the snake flies out but they carry on driving
minutes later the First Lady’s motorcade arrives and is halted while the Feds check out the weird dead snake, then eventually move on
Angie is called for a second time to dispose of the snake and is brought into contact with the authorities
that night Diego Beltrán is walking along the same road when he spots a conch pearl amid the rails
a few days later he’s picked up by the authorities as an illegal and the pearl is discovered, connecting him to Kiki
somehow the connection between dead Kiki, the pearls and an illegal immigrant is leaked to the President who immediately shapes it to his anti-immigrant narrative and he gives an extempore speech in which he blames Diego for Kiki’s murder
a crowd assembles outside the Palm Beach County Gaol where he’s being held, the story goes all over the national press and Diego becomes a symptom of everything evil and wicked which is threatening the US of A

Angie, Jerry and Paul are agonisingly aware that Diego is completely innocent, but the thing has now got so big and so inflamed that it’s going to be hard if not impossible to shift the narrative, and risky for the two lawmen to get involved. Difficult for individuals to go up against the full force of the Presidential propaganda machine and his attack media. The whole thing has spiralled into, as Angie puts it: ‘a five-star clusterfuck’ (p.153).

Donald and Melania Trump

I knew Trump was referenced in the book but I was curious to see how Hiaasen would handle it. Initially he is a peripheral figure, satirically referred to throughout as ‘the commander in chief’. Presumably it is for legal purposes that he is never referred to by name. His Miami home is jokily referred to as ‘Casa Bellicosa’. Some of his (fictional tweets) are quote verbatim, full of spelling and grammar mistakes.

It is a winning piece of satire that the rich old ladies have formed a club named the POTUS Pussies, referencing the commander-in-chief’s famous quote about grabbing pussy. He is referred to as crude and blustering, as ‘that dysfunctional hump in the White House’ (p.189) – all in all, par for the course, by the standards of American liberals who subjected Trump to four years of scathing criticism.

Then about half way through the novel things change when the Trump figure directly intervenes in the Diego case. Things change from being generalised satire about his crude blustering character to becoming a concrete demonstration of what his rabble-rousing xenophobia means for a real individual, a real person whose life is being wrecked. The commander-in-chief figure changes from being merely pathetic to becoming positively malevolent.

In the earlier parts of the book there are more scenes featuring Melania Trump, riding in the motorcade, prowling her private apartments at the Casa Bellicosa, bored and horny.

I wonder whether it was for legal reasons that neither of them are named. The president is referred to as the president or commander-in-chief, never by name. Indeed, early on Hiaasen adopts the comic strategy of referring to both of them by the codewords assigned to them by the Secret Service.

Thus Melania is never named, but referred to throughout as Mockingbird, her codename, a curiously poignant name. The president’s codeword is Mastodon, which he loves because it sounds mighty. With typical ignorance he asks if he can visit a zoo to see some real-life mastodons but nobody is brave enough to tell him that mastodons, a generic term for woolly mammoths and suchlike, died out during the last ice age.

We see Mockingbird in her car, interacting with her dishy bodyguard, named ‘Keith Josephson’ (which is actually a pseudonym assigned him by the service; his birth name was Ahmet Youssef which, understandably, the Service want to keep concealed from the xenophobic commander in chief, p.86, another piece of satire on the president’s idiotic xenophobia. Youssef’s full backstory is given on pages 281 to 283).

Possibly the most scandalous thing in the book is that Mockingbird is described as having an affair with Youssef/Keith. We first realise this when she insists he hands her a towel as she emerges naked from a luxury bath, and she then orders him to **** her. Then we get used to her ordering him to service her at short notice in a variety of luxury locations. But as the story progresses we realise he, Keith/Youssef, is genuinely in love with her, genuinely thinks she is different with him, even after people start to talk and rumours about them to circulate.

Trump insults

The funny thing is that Donald Trump had already been referenced in a number of earlier Hiaasen novels, way before he showed any political ambitions, as an epitome of American over-wealthy narcissism. It’s an epic irony that the man Hiaasen had been mocking for decades as an embodiment of American shallowness ended up becoming 45th President of the United States. The fact it happened is beyond satire and what it says about contemporary American society needs no comment.

The president, according to those who know him best:

has no memory
has feet like moist loaves
is a ‘fat toad’ (p.248)
is ‘paranoid, draft-dodging, whore hopping…’ (p.261)
is described as ‘Presidential Shitweasel’ (p.300) and ‘the climate-denier-in-chief’ (p.301) by Skink
is an ‘ignorant clown’ – Ryskval (p.369)
is a ‘lying puke-bucket’ – Angie (p.371)

He has a mistress, Suzy Spooner (p.293), a chunky pole dancer who calls herself a nutritionist. We meet the poor woman on several occasions, desperately helping the president to adopt a sex position which can work round his bloated gut and the fact he can no longer sustain an erection. It is typical Hiaasen/typical America, that Suzy is at the same time hawking round New York publishers a kiss-and-tell memoir in which she compares the President’s gonads to ‘dessicated chickpeas’ and describes how he snorts like a wildebeest when he climaxes (pages 293 and 294).

The president struggles mightily to have a bowel motion, emerging from the can puffing and panting, and then struggles to get a hold of his belt buckle ‘below the rolling sea of his gut’ (p.313). He’s portrayed as being fully aware of the ‘phoney Facebook ads’ paid for by his supporters (p.314). When he forgets that her dog died over a year ago, Mockingbird simply calls him ‘such a dick’ (p.315).

Tut tut. Not very respectful.

Plot developments

Uric proves what a scumbag he is by murdering his assistant, the dim-witted Prince Paladin aka Keever Bracco, weighingt down his body and dumping it in a canal near where he dumped the stolen car they drove the snake around in. This is a rookie crim error, meaning both are soon discovered by the cops.

Uric’s anxiety about the cops’ discovery is itself short-lived as he himself is swiftly bumped off by a hitman hired by the Lipid Estate manager Teabull, who is quickly emerging as the daemon ex machina of the plot.

Rather unprofessionally, Uric’s body is hanged from a suspension bridge along with a suicide note in which he claims complete responsibility for killing Kiki, stealing her jewels and then murdering his accomplice – this is Teabull’s pathetic attempt to get the whole damn story shut down. To little avail. When ‘our team’ of Angie, Jerry and Paul hear about it and read the note they realise how fake it is.

The paranoid rich i.e. Fay Alex Riptoad et al, and their attack dog media, soon embellish the Diego situation to have him being a member of the fearsome DBC-88, the ‘Diego Border Cartel’. Nobody knows what 88 means but it sounds scary (p.221). It is an example of the general fictionalisation of American life in which malicious rumours instantly become poisonous political fact.

To complete his tidy-up strategy, Teabull hires an arsonist to lure Angie in her truck to a fake call-out in a remote location as the sun is setting, and the guy lobs a firebomb in the back of her truck. Both she and Joel who she’d taken along, scramble out of the truck which melts down and is a write-off. But this doesn’t put Angie off, was never likely to.

In the event all Teabull’s efforts come to naught as he is sacked from his job at the Lipid Estate as the media furore around Diego snowballs. A TV station runs an entirely fictitious ‘reconstruction’ of the night Diego and his dastardly accomplices supposedly broke into the estate and abducted little old Kiki, an entirely fictional recreation which leads to just about every rich charity cancelling its bookings at the Lipid mansion, hence Teabull’s sacking. It is also another example of the fictionalisation of American journalism, the triumph of fakery over news.

Mockingbird’s affair with her Secret Service man becomes increasingly intense. His superior, the same Paul Ryskamp who is beginning an affair with Angie, learns about Keith and the First Lady and warns him off, and steps are taken to reassign him, but Mockingbird intervenes to keep him around as her lover. She and the President never even touch each other, let alone sleep together. Anyway, he’s screwing Suzi Spooner so Mockingbird has no moral qualms.

The return of Skink

But the big revelation of the last third of the novel is the Return of Skink, yes everybody, Skink! Skink is back! And his trusty helper and minder, Jim Tile, an old man now, who walks with a cane and lives at the Rainbow of Life Senior Centre. It’s Jim who gets in touch with Angie Armstrong, tells her he sat in back during her court case for mutilating Pruitt on behalf of a friend who admired her style i.e. the old eco-vigilante and ex-governor, once known as Clinton Tyree, who has for a long time now (well, ever since Hiaasen’s second novel), gone under the pseudonym Skink.

Jim gives Angie a map to Skink’s secret base deep in the Everglades and she hires a flatboater to take her out there. Just to keep up his quota of outlandish concepts, Hiaasen tells us that in the empty eye socket where Skink usually sports a glass eye, he is currently incubating an iguana egg. This doesn’t faze Angie, used to all kinds of weird critter situations, so she passes the Skink test.

He then offers her some roadkill coyote for dinner, which is standard. But we discover he has a new habit: he is continually micro-dosing himself with acid to stave off boredom and despair, and he has slipped a little into her rum.

Which explains why, when Skink takes her into his snake enclosure, Angie finds them glowing with fiery red eyes and changing colour. Snake enclosure? Yes. For it is Skink who has been collecting king-sized pythons and deploying them in Presidential hangouts. He was responsible for deploying mega pythons into: a vanload of the President’s favourite key lime pies; the First Lady’s favourite fashion boutique, plus 2 or 3 other random locations. Did he deploy the monster python which ate Kiki?

Anyway, his obsession with giant pythons explains why Skink’s camp is among trees from which hang hundreds of long dried snakeskins, which the pythons have shed. Half way through their meeting, Angie realises that Skink not only took interest in her trial but paid for her defence lawyer. So he has deep involvement with her going back some way. With that revelation, he shoos Angie back to the shore of the island where the airboat driver has returned to collect her, and she stumbles, dazed, back towards civilisation after this trippy encounter with Hiaasen’s great anti-hero.

The novel heads towards the traditional Big Climax, which is the so-called Commander’s Ball, hosted by Mastodon at the Casa Bellicosa. Seems pretty obvious Skink has got something big planned, like releasing all the pythons he’s been collecting.

Meanwhile, back in what you could call the dirty realist end of the plot, Diego, still in prison, foils one attack by a white supremacist, but is then badly stabbed and beaten up by some ‘Aryan Brothers’. (Look them up. American prisons are full of white supremacist groups. No wonder our media admire America so much: so much to copy, so much to learn from.)

Diego is hospitalised, his plight is dire, a friendly Hispanic tells him there’s a ten grand bounty on his head, eleven if they cut off his ‘nut sack’. His defence lawyers quit because they’ve been receiving death threats. The gaol guards are also threatened and/or tired of the extra hassle of protecting him. They include a new leather belt in his next laundry delivery. One of them gives him a full bottle of sleeping pills. These are not-too-subtle hints that he kill himself. Thus the fate of illegals in the US ‘justice’ system’ i.e. hounded to death.

The President’s Ball

Well, the President’s Ball does serve as the climax to the novel alright, though, to tell the truth, it is a little underwhelming. Highlights are:

1. Throughout the novel there’s been a running thread about the President’s tanning sunbed, and the guys who service and clean it. In the days leading up to the ball there are some unexplained malfunctions so it is no real surprise when it goes badly wrong just hours before the big event, turning the President’s face aubergine purple and burning his hair. With the result that he appears on the stage and delivers a big speech hiding his face behind the only thing they could rustle up at short notice – a Bakongo tribal fertility mask!!!! (p.350) More clearly than ever, you can see how Hiaasen goes way beyond ‘satire’ into a realm of lunatic farce.

2. Mastodon addresses his puzzled millionaire guests from behind his African mask but, when he turns to introduce his lovely wife, she isn’t there – and this is because she is in her private rooms having wild sex with Special Agent Keith/Youssef (in a tiny detail, she is riding him cowgirl style, the position which I’ve noticed, is favoured by all of Hiaasen’s strong, independent female protagonists)

3. As we might have predicted, a massive Burmese python does turn up in the grounds of the Casa Bellicosa, where it disturbs the most repellent of the POTUS Pussies, the cohort of super-rich widow supporters of the Commander-in-Chief, Fay Alex Riptoad. Unfortunately the python interruption occurs just as she is having the front of her expensive dress unbuttoned by an over-sexed guest, Stanleigh Cobo, who thinks he’s ingested a heroic amount of erection-inducing narwhal horn (a long story about erectile dysfunction and the lengths the rich will go to in order to secure cures).

Secret Agent Paul Ryskval had made sure to invite Angie Armstrong to the ball and so, when Fay’s screams attract all the guests, Angie takes centre stage, the only one with the balls and expertise to confront the huge swaying python and Angie suddenly realises that it is tripping. Skink is dosing his giant pythons with LSD.

Still, in the end, Angie manages to decapitate this one like the last one, although her pretty ball dress does get covered in spraying blood in the process. Once the body is taken away by ground staff, and the guests wander off gossiping, Angie goes to the ladies loo to have a good cry. When she comes out, gentlemanly special agent Ryskamp tells her how fabulous she looks and how brave she was. Which cheers her up, a bit.

Angie and the First Lady

The president addressing the crowd in an African mask and a tripping python menacing his chief cheerleader just as she is being undressed for sex, this ought to be funny, and it reads fairly funny in summary, but in practice, somehow, I found it a bit inevitable and, I’m afraid, underwhelming. Maybe I’ve read too many Hiaasens and know what to expect.

But if the doomed gala ball turns out to be a bit of a damp squib, maybe what follows at the end of the evening is the real climax of the plot. Angie stays at the ball after the python episode and slips a message to the First Lady asking to see her. Mockingbird is curious to meet the woman who dealt with the giant snake and so agrees, and the two women meet on the seawall of the Casa Bellicosa (accompanied at a distance by all Mockingbird’s security men).

Here Angie explains that a) she knows all about Mockingbird’s affair with Keith, and b) the fact that Keith is a Muslim would play terribly with the C-in-C’s supporter, and c) she knows all about the President’s affair with the pole dancer, d) who is writing a no-holds-barred memoir about her affair with the President.

She, Angie, will blow all this wide open, leak all these facts to the press, ruin everyone’s lives, unless Mockingbird uses her influence, and this threat, to get the President to give Diego Beltrán a full pardon and fast track his appeal for political asylum.

Which is what Mockingbird proceeds to do, encountering the President as he stumbles out of a state room where he just tried and miserably failed to take the pole dancer from behind. Mockingbird makes plain she will blow the whole gaff, expose their sham marriage and list his many affairs to the press unless he releases Diego. So Mastodon caves in.

I hadn’t mentioned that Jim Tile had used some old connections to get invited to the president’s ball, dressing snappily and toting a stylish cane. Right at the end of the evening, after she has had her seawall meeting, he accompanies Angie out onto the steps of the mansion as chauffeur-driven cars line up to collect the super-rich. Jim climbs into one which, she suddenly realises, is driven by Skink. She races after it, flags it down, and is amazed at Skink’s stylish appearance. He has washed and combed his hair and put on a suit specially.

I thought the funniest thing in the entire book was the fact that the iguana whose egg he had been carrying in his empty eye socket has now hatched.

Skink smiled down at the breast pocket of his suit jacket. A little bright green head was peeking out. ‘We’re working on our manners,’ Skink whispered. (p.378)

It’s almost the only moment of gentleness. There’s plenty of humour elsewhere in the book, but it’s of the savage, violent, macabre or super-cynical fuckstick variety. This was one tiny moment of humanity. Thank you, Skink.

It’s quickly over though because when Angie asks what that loud banging is, Skink explains it’s her stalker, Pruitt, stashed in the boot of the car. Skink is going to take him out to the wilderness to teach him ‘how to be at one with nature’. That’s comedy, too, but of the more tough-minded, cruel variety.

Epilogue

Diego Beltrán is freed on orders from the president, is smuggled out the back of the gaol, given a wig and fake moustache and transported north to New Jersey.

Turns out that Skink unleashed not one but a host of monster pythons at a number of other charity balls on the same night. Police chief Jerry Crosby drove round to all of the events, shooting them dead, but was filmed doing so, clips which made their way onto YouTube and killed the Florida hospitality sector stone dead. Why have a party in Florida if a python might eat your guests? The industry’s anger falls on the chief and he quits before he’s fired.

Mockingbird has Youssef acknowledged as her lover, but still kept on by the Secret Service because she blackmails the Secret Service bosses with her knowledge of a hushed-up drug orgy among the agents.

On the last pages Angie hires an airboat and skims out through the Everglades to visit Skink in his new base. No more snakes, he transported them all north to freedom. And Pruitt? Skink attached an electronic tracking collar round his neck and set him free in the wilderness. He’s still alive, somewhere.

And then the punchline to the whole story: the huge Burmese python which ate Kiki Fitzsimmons? Turns out it wasn’t Skink’s idea. He didn’t set it loose on the Lipid Estate. It made its own way there. It was a normal, free python doing its own thing. Nothing to do with Skink, the incident only gave him the inspiration for his later battle plan. Angie laughs with relief, Skink is off the hook and takes none of the blame.

THE END.

The environment

This is the first novel in his long career where Hiaasen seems to have given up on saving the environment which is, I think, the appropriate response. The fight to save the environment has been decisively lost. Eco-systems around the world, along with the countless species they contain, are being exterminated on a daily basis. Global warming is only one aspect of the man-made destruction of the environment, of all environments, going on all the time, everywhere, as Angie mournfully reflects:

It didn’t seem to matter who was in power – nothing got better in the besieged, breathtaking world she cared about most. The Everglades would never be the lush unbroken river it once was; the shallows of Florida Bay would never be as pure and sparkling with fish; the bleached dying reefs of the Keys would never bloom fully back to life. Being overrun and exploited was the historical fate of places so rare and beautiful…

The President of the United States was a soulless imbecile who hated the outdoors but, in Angie’s view, at this point Teddy Roosevelt himself couldn’t turn the tide if he came back from the dead. All the treasured wilderness that had been sacrificed at the altar of growth was gone for all time. More disappeared every day; nothing ever changed except the speed of destruction, and only because there were fewer pristine pieces to sell off, carve up and pave. (p.318)

Fruity and novel language

Hiaasen’s characters swear freely and so does the narrator. ‘Fuckstick’, ‘shitbird’, ‘cockhead’ and ‘Señor Fuckwhistle’ (p.258) being some of the nicer expressions characters use about each other. Here are some other samples of state-of-the-art Yankee slang:

Prince was flipping through channels like a gacked-up chimp. (p.74)
‘The Feds cut your time ’cause you flipped. You rat-fucked your friends.’ (p.74) = betrayed.
‘Hit the shower, bro’. You smell like a fucking grow house.’ (p.173) I think ‘grow house’ means the kind of indoors greenhouse space used to grow marijuana.
Uric ended up paying the Prince the full three hundred he wanted, which he ended up spending on chronic. (p.173) ‘Among cannabis consumers, chronic can be used as slang for marijuana itself, but many users reserve the term for particularly potent strains of the plant’ (Dictionary.com)
nutsack = scrotum
knuckle bump, aka fist bump
‘I got a dope new truck’ (p.214) – where ‘dope’ presumably means cool, neat, great.
‘I can’t take a chance that he hasn’t suddenly stripped his gears.’ (p.242) meaning lost it, gone mad, gone psycho.
Two white-clad Brits stood in wait while the driver, whose name was Guppo, backed up the gaily painted Betancourt Pastries chariot. (p.247) ‘Stood in wait’?
One day Nutter was approached in the chow line by an inmate who said a group of patriots on the outside was offering serious bank for the death of Diego Beltrán. (p.254) = big money
A buzz kill = something which destroys the mood, specially a romantic mood around sex (p.280)
Studly = like a stud, as in ‘a studly lover’ (p.326)
Reamed = getting reamed, being reamed = a strong telling-off (p.33)
Rails = lines of cocaine (p.366)
Toasted = stoned (p.380)

Fleabag

I was surprised when Hiaasen has his sympathetic protagonist, Angie, in a spare evening, catch an episode of Fleabag, the award-winning British TV series. He also has a character, the one-handed psycho Pruitt, reference Game of Thrones, specifically the one-handed character Jaime Lannister (p.257). Gotta keep up with the popular culture, I suppose.

Credit

Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2020. Page references are to the 2021 Sphere paperback edition.

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