`Strip Tease' a pretty read, but much of it we've seen

DATE                  09/12/93
NEWSPAPER             THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION               SHOW
EDITION               MORNING
PAGE                  F31
STORY LENGTH          29 INCHES
HEADLINE              `Strip Tease' a pretty read, but much of it we've seen
BYLINE/CREDIT         DAN FROOMKIN:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS         BOOKS

  When Carl Hiaasen gets up a righteous head of steam, he is one of
  the funniest people alive.
     As a columnist for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen has brought his
  vitriolic humor to bear on countless idiotic real-life villains.
  (Miami eclipses even Orange County in that department.)
     And Hiaasen's first work of fiction, "Tourist Season," which was
  part comic caper novel and part anti-developer manifesto, became an
  instant classic in the popular, competitive and ever-expanding
  genre of frantic Florida-based thrillers.
     So after three manic but only mildly funny novels since "Tourist
  Season," it seemed to bode well that his new book, "Strip Tease,"
  featured a grotesquely corrupt congressman beholden to a family of
  sugar growers making obscene profits from the massive government
  subsidies they get in return for despoiling the Everglades.
     Throw in the deliciously lewd milieu of a nudie joint that
  features creamed-corn wrestling, and it sounded like a sure winner.
     But like a really good-looking stripper who takes it all off too
  quickly and doesn't dance very well, Hiaasen's novel is
  front-loaded with the good stuff. And what he does with it is
  disappointing.
     Mind you, at times Hiaasen's prose is nothing short of
  eye-popping.
     From the get-go, the book's characters are vastly memorable.
  There is Congressman David Dilbeck, a spectacular pervert as well
  as an amoral son of a gun. There is the protagonist, former FBI
  stenographer turned nude dancer Erin Grant. There's the fixer,
  Malcolm "Moldy" Moldowsky, who rhapsodizes about his hero, John
  Mitchell.
     There's Sgt. Al Garcia, a heroic but practical homicide cop who,
  for instance, hates dismemberment murders because the paperwork
  expands in direct proportion to the number of body parts.
     And there's Shad the bouncer, a delightful monster who on page 6
  can be found using a surgical hemostat to peel the aluminum safety
  seal from a container of low-fat blueberry yogurt in order to
  secrete a roach inside and sue for emotional trauma.
     Hiaasen's scorching imagination also has lots of fun at the
  expense of psychiatrists, lawyers and especially judges.
     But after a while, as intricate and frenetic as the plot may be,
  it's not as nutty or amusing as the characters. And you're just
  waiting for the inevitable happy resolution. It's a problem only a
  delightful lunatic like Hiaasen could have.

  `Strip Tease'
   Author: Carl Hiaasen
   Info: Alfred A. Knopf, $21, 354 pages
   Bottom line: Another fine farce from a master of frantic Florida
  fiction

  (SIDEBAR)
   Excerpts from `Strip Tease'

     From the introduction: "This is a work of fiction. All names and
  characters are either invented or used fictitiously. The events
  described are purely imaginary, although the accounts of topless
  creamed-corn wrestling are based on fact."

     "Shad was deeply absorbed. Using a surgical hemostat, he was
  trying to peel the aluminum safety seal from a 4-ounce container of
  low-fat blueberry yogurt. The light was poor in the dressing room,
  and Shad's eyesight wasn't too sharp . . . .
     " `I gotta concentrate,' he said gruffly to Erin.
     "By now she'd seen the dead cockroach, a hefty one even by
  Florida standards. Legs in the air, the roach lay on the table near
  Shad's left elbow.
     "Erin said, `Let me guess. You've had another brainstorm.' "

     "For political reasons, the government's payout to the sugar
  industry was patriotically promoted as aid to the struggling family
  farmer. True, some of the big sugar companies were family-owned,
  but the family members themselves seldom touched the soil. The
  closest most of them got to the actual crop were the cubes that
  they dropped in their coffee at the Bankers' Club."

     "In the early 1970s, Mordecai was among the hundreds of
  idealistic young law-school graduates who rushed to south Florida
  with the dream of defending drug smugglers for astronomical cash
  fees. He'd even studied Castilian Spanish in anticipation of his
  Colombian clientele! But Mordecai arrived in Miami to discover a
  depressingly small number of imprisoned South American drug barons;
  defense lawyers seemed to outnumber the defendants. An attorney of
  modest talents stood little chance of landing a billionaire
  narcotrafficker as a client."

     "Moldy was at the top of his game; insidiously powerful,
  obscenely wealthy and largely untouchable. Up until now. Lately his
  hard-earned arrogance had lost some of its starch . . . . Others
  were to blame. Free-floating incompetence threatened to destroy an
  artifice that (he) had spent years constructing. He knew how his
  hero, John Mitchell, must've felt when those idiots bungled a
  simple burglary. A life's work destroyed by unspeakable
  stupidities."