Carl Hiaasen, On Analyzing His Novels

00:08 [Carl Hiaasen] I suspect that as in all English classes that a lot of the interpretation is subjective. And I think whether you're Faulkner or Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Stephen King or Tom Clancy, whoever you, are your job is to tell an entertaining story. Not every sentence is freighted with deep meaning. There are some things you do just to

00:30 move the story along. I can remember a few years ago, many years ago, there was an article about my books that was published in something, I think, called the Journal of Popular Culture, or something like that, which is a legitimate publication. Actually, it was a great piece of writing, and the guy had analyzed all my books up to that point and analyzed them far more deeply than I had while I was writing them. He found similarities and recurring themes and some of it actually stopped to make me think,

01:00 maybe I'm doing this subconsciously, but it certainly wasn't any part of a deliberate game plan. The thing that I enjoyed about the piece was he certainly understood that the main goal was a satirical rendering of an event or of a place, in my case South Florida, where I live and work. And that the goal was entertainment in the sense that it was satire. Some people who read satire don't get it and others do, so that was pleasing. But then he had

01:30 come up with an interesting thing that I didn't even know I was doing. He claimed that in every one of my books there was always -- and he found some symbolism in this -- a floater. Now, in forensic terms a floater is a victim of a homicide, a dead body that's found in water, whether it's a canal, or the Atlantic Ocean, or a lake. But he said in all my books up to that point there had been a floater, and I didn't even know I was doing it. I remember at the time I had read the paper I was about three-quarters of the way through a novel

02:00 called Native Tongue and it had no floater in it. So I panicked, and said, now, I don't want to wreck this guy's theory and I certainly want to be consistent with my other novels. So I fiddled around and came up with a very legitimate reason to put a floater in that book. I stuck one right in there and it just fit in fine with the plot. But I thought, at least now he's going to be consistent because I didn't want to screw up his whole paper. I didn't know I was doing it before.

02:30 And the book I'm working on now, let me think, there's no floater in it, but I'll probably have one by the end of the manuscript, just because now I feel obliged to fulfill that guy's theory. I mean, the paper was so well-written, it was so good that I thought, this guy understands my work and I certainly don't understand it, so I'm going to go with what he says.