Attention Carl Hiaasen: Your Book 'Star Island' is a Bestseller

A conversation with author Carl Hiaasen about his latest novel Star Island somehow degenerated into a contest with Imus over who had the better guy-in-Disney-character-costume-beats-up-little-kid story.

Hiaasen, who, like Imus, calls Mike Lupica a close friend, drew from the world of celebrity “news” to write Star Island, and expressed frustration that such frivolity often edges out “real” news.

“The amount of information we now know about these people from the ‘Jersey Shore’ dwarfs the amount of information we know about Afghanistan,” he said.

As Hiaasen is a Floridian, he chose celebrity-infested South Beach as the setting for Star Island, calling it “the perfect place to set a book about pretension and emptiness.” Luckily, fate intervened over the last few weeks to all but ensure his new novel’s success.  

“I had no idea when I was writing it that publication would coincide with Lindsay Lohan’s incarceration,” he said. “It’s just a stroke of good luck!”

Though he conceded one need not be Nostradamus to foresee Lohan’s downfall. 

The villain in Star Island is a paparazzo, the sort of character Hiaasen has always wanted to create. The novel also centers on a “delaminating young starlet,” as Hiaasen put it, who possesses shockingly little talent but has become famous nonetheless. “She’s such a train wreck that they have to hire an actress to go out and party for her, because she’s too trashed to party,” he said.

A bodyguard character from one of Hiaasen’s previous books reappears, wielding a prosthetic hand in the form of a weed whacker that he uses to maintain order. He also carries an electric cattle prod to zap the idiotic starlit every time she uses poor grammar or syntax.

Not long ago, Hiaasen, who is a columnist for the Miami Herald, did a series about lawsuits against Disney. When Imus said that his favorite Disney story featured a drunken Mickey Mouse slamming a kid against a chain link fence, Hiaasen tried to one-up him.

During the nightly Main Street Parade one evening, an overheated “Pluto” was accosted by a small child tugging on his tail. After a few minutes, Pluto reached his last nerve and drop kicked the child (or “the little sucker,” in Hiassen’s view) back into the stands.

Happily, the kid wasn’t hurt, but a lawsuit ensued anyway, leading Hiaasen to conclude, “You’d give anything to have that video.”

-Julie Kanfer