Lucky You
Carl Hiaasen
Knopf hbk, 353 pgs
now available as a Pan paperback
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
Carl Hiaasen's Lucky You comes as welcome relief after the scatter-gun scatter-brained mess that was Stormy Weather. If that reads too much like leaning on a reputation, then this comes on like someone on the sticky end of a critical mauling.
Hiaasen deals in grotesques and this book is no different. Not that JoLayne Lucks is a grotesque. No, she's just a very private citizen who lives quietly in Grange, Florida, playing the same numbers each week on the Lotto.
Elsewhere, Bodean Gazzer and slobbish sidekick Chub let the random machine take the strain. And this particular week, this particular draw, their numbers just happen not only to match those JoLayne so carefully picks, but coincide with the very ones the Lotto declares.
That's $14 million apiece. More than plenty. But not for those who live by the credo that "man can't get enough guns and pussy". Not when you want to arm your very own right-wing militia. And especially not when you're expected to share your prize with a Negro like JoLayne Lucks.
Hiaasen is always at his sharpest gunning for white trash, and they don't come much whiter or trashier than the "camouflaged colonel and the one-eyed panty-sniffing stoner" who believe evil NATO troops are massing off the coast, and whose choice of militia name - White Rebel Brotherhood - also happens to be shared by a black rap act.
This is all excellent comic fodder, well handled, if held together by one of Hiaasen's slightly anaemic, overly square-jawed heroes. Tom Krome is the big-city feature writer sent to cover JoLayne's good fortune, but fortunately he's more catalyst than key, there to keep pushing the busy narrative forward when it threatens to sag.
And Grange itself is a wonderful creation - a town famous for nothing so much as honest-to-goodness miracles. Like the highway oil stain that resembles our Lord. Or the Madonna that weeps real perfumed tears on demand. Or the local stigmatic looking to up the ante by Black and Deckering his feet as well as his hands. Even Krome gets to die and rise again in Grange.
Hiaasen stirs up genuine laughs with his typical everything-and-the-kitchen-sink plotting, keeping Lucky You bubbling nicely for all of a lengthy 353 pages. It's been a rough couple of years - that clumsy novel and a best forgotten film of Striptease - but this really looks like something approaching top form.