9 Books That Will Make You Reconsider Florida Stereotypes

2 weeks ago 1

My personal shorthand for describing the place I grew up—New Port Richey, Florida—is to say that the culture is defined by the absence of culture, but this isn’t quite true. To be more precise, it feels like there’s no culture because no culture has won the day, no way of being has outstripped the others for supremacy. There’s such varied competition when it comes to manners, customs, and values that the atmosphere remains a rich, even static of influences. This still holds true for parts of Florida like mine, and was even more true in the 90s, when Penalties of June, my new book, takes place—coastal Pasco and Hernando counties are not rural since no one farms, not urban by a long shot, not small-town charming like places in Mississippi, not suburban since people don’t drive to Tampa for work or possess the wherewithal to follow the fashion trends, gritty but not particularly blighted (except to some degree by meth and pills, like a lot of places), not ritzy, not even beachy. The Long Islanders act like Long Islanders. The Carolinians act like Carolinians. The Minnesotans like Minnesotans. The Cubans like Cubans.

For a writer like me who has always believed in a bit of random wantonness when it comes to plot, who wants characters to say things the reader could not have expected, who wants both the zany Florida-man brand of crime and the ruthless, efficient heights of organized crime, Florida has always seemed the American state with the most narrative latitude. Anything can happen. Anyone can be there. No religion or philosophy or commercial ambition seems unlikely.

When I was in high school, native Floridians were rare. It was, and largely still is, a state everyone moves to, rather than a state people have roots in. This self-selection regarding being Floridian causes, necessarily, an abundance of risk-takers, of escapees from other lives, of schemers and opportunists, of people in recovery from something, of people who believe the grass might be greener (it might be, if you keep the sprinklers pumping day and night)—in short, Florida is, decade after decade, flooded with a disproportionate glut of human beings who are not meek nor content nor predisposed to toe the line.

Pratt, the main character of Penalties of June, grew naturally out of my home territory in that he has no roots—his parents are deceased and when he emerges from a stay in prison, he’s faced with starting his life over. He grew out of this place because he’s beset by contradictions: Bonne, the crime boss, is at once the person who helps him most and the person who puts him in the most danger; Kallie, his not-quite-old-flame, is everything beautiful in the world and also his greatest worry; the most morally sound of his acquaintances is a pawn shop owner, and the most devious is a detective. The only thing clear is that he’s going to have to do something bad in order to do any good.

The nine books I’ve selected comprise a dizzying tour of divergent Florida experiences and styles whose kinship, if they share any, is tied up in heat and crime and displacement and unpredictability.

New Hope for the Dead, by Charles Willeford

I’m equally likely to run into someone who’s never heard of Charles Willeford as someone who says he’s their favorite crime writer. I chose this of the four Hoke Moseley novels because it’s the oddest. It breaks the conventions of the detective novel to a shocking degree, but it succeeds precisely because it breaks those expectations. In short, all the domestic and romantic strife Willeford puts Moseley through, all the bureaucratic mire, all the unglamorous random hassles—all these things, combined with countless idiosyncratic details that seem too random to make up, create the disconcerting feeling of real life (real, but much more interesting than yours).

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

I was first introduced to this book in a dialogue class. Open at almost any page, and you see characters talking to other characters. Hurston was trained as an anthropologist, and has a great ear for accents and dialects (phonetic dialogue is rare enough these days that it might take readers a few pages to get used to it, but it’s worth it). The book was received coldly by critics upon its publication in 1937, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the book—for example, Richard Wright and other black writers and scholars thought Their Eyes Were Watching God wasn’t political or bitter enough. In later days, it became celebrated. The story is consistently entertaining, and when it’s sad it’s really sad. It’s the story of one woman’s coming-of-age through the narrative scaffolding of three marriages—the old husband she leaves, the rich husband she hates who dies on her, and the poor husband she loves who she’s forced to kill.

Miami by Joan Didion

One of the best attempts made to untangle the knots that tied 1960s-1980s Miami to Washington and Havana and Moscow and Nicaragua. For those in exile, Miami was a place where paranoia couldn’t really exist; if you were involved with la lucha, somebody was out to get you. Didion’s reporting spans from dry congressional reports to poetic descriptions of the physical and spiritual atmosphere of the tropic metropolis. She takes on racial strife and cultural difference, from events as serious as the McDuffie Riots to the following amusing account of what Cubans thought of Americans:

[They] never touched one another, nor did they argue. Americans did not share the attachment to family which characterized Cuban life. Americans did not share the attachment to patria that characterized Cuban life. Americans placed undue importance on being on time…they were by temperament “naïve,” a people who could live and die without ever understanding those nuances of conspiracy and allegiance on which, in the Cuban view, the world turned.

Ninety-Two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane

This book is from a time (the early 70s) when literary zest and passion and abandon and individuality were valued as a commodity in themselves and considered well worth sacrificing clean plotlines and easy themes for. I’ll say this: this guy is a wizard in the tight spaces of sentences and a wizard in the commonplace darknesses of the human psyche. The book’s jacket (my edition anyway) quotes somebody named L.E. Sissman, who says it better than I can: “McGuane shares with Celine a genius for seeing the profuse, disparate materials of everyday life as a highly organized nightmare.” Literally, the book is about Thomas Skelton, a prodigal son come home to Key West to be a fishing guide, and his conflict with the already-established top guide Nichol Dance. More importantly, it’s about Skelton finding a way to stay sane despite the cultures of both America and the Keys deteriorating around him. 1

Breaking & Entering by Joy Williams

Joy Williams is my favorite writer. A dangerous writer to adopt as a model because she intentionally eschews overarching, suspenseful plotlines in favor of what she does so damn well, which is let interesting and peculiar characters be interesting and peculiar. She’s a writer to savor sentence-by-sentence—to really enjoy her, one has to surrender the comfort of knowing where the greater narrative is going. In B&E, Willie and Liberty are a young couple that keeps a roof over their heads by breaking into vacation homes while the rich owners are away. From the first page, a bit of Williams’ magic for making characters in no time:

“Liberty and Willie saw the guard each morning. He was an old, lonely man, rather glossy and puffed up, his jaw puckered in and his chest puffed out like a child concentrating on making a muscle. He told Willie he had a cancer, but that grapefruit was curing it. He told Willie that they had wanted to cut again, but he had chosen grapefruit instead. He talked quite openly to Willie, as though they had been correspondents for years, just now meeting. Willie and Liberty must have reminded him of people he thought he knew, people who must’ve looked appropriate living in a million-dollar soaring cypress house on the beach.”

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Based on the true horror story of the Dozier School for Boys in the Florida panhandle, this is simply one of the best books I’ve read. An instant classic. It succeeds on every level a novel might—complex, compelling characters; vivid, charged setting; heart-wrenching plot; narrative inventiveness—and at the same time illuminates real historical events. For my money, it easily outshines Whitehead’s other Pulitzer-winning novel, The Underground Railroad. Elwood Curtis, the protagonist of The Nickel Boys, is one of the best drawn and most genuinely sympathetic main characters you’ll come across—the devastation you’ll feel at his (and all the boys at Nickel Academy) treatment is only magnified by the fact that the real place only closed down in 2011.

Alligator Gold by Janet Post

Cracker Westerns is a series focused on the cattle culture of the frontier days Florida is a jungly place to raise cattle, and so cows were constantly getting lost in the thick vegetation. The rough-mannered cowboys hired to extract them (who often went into business for themselves, corralling and overbranding the wayward livestock) were called crackers because of the extra-long whips they carried. (In later days, people started calling anyone born in Florida a ‘Florida cracker.’) These books are meant to be light entertainment—Alligator Gold features a secret trove of treasure and a villain named Snake—but as light entertainment goes, they’re some of the best around.

Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

If you grew up on the lower side of middle class in pre-smartphone Florida, the details and atmosphere in this collection will leave you stricken with their accuracy—the retention ponds; the juvenile delinquency at shopping malls; hopping from bare foot to bare foot on hot pavement. This book feels grounded in the real, the gritty, the physical, the desperately routine, and yet something big is always happening: suicide and miscarriage and cancer and violent muggings and eaten pets and the fetishizing of feet and threats delivered via handjob. Moniz’s greatest strength might be her ability to fully, sometimes shockingly inhabit the mindsets and attitudes of her usually female and often adolescent/teen protagonists—within a page, she can sink you completely and unquestionably into the psyche of her main character, and from there does with you what she wishes.

Everyday Psycho Killers: A History for Girls by Lucy Corin

This is a novel, but if it didn’t say that on the cover, you’d think it was an odd sort of memoir. Sometimes it’s an essay. Occasionally, a treatise on speculative neuroscience. You have to earn your readerly footing. At the beginning, the book hides its narrator—there’s a 1st person voice, but we don’t know who it’s attached to; a girl is spoken about in the 3rd person, and then we realize that girl is the 1st person narrator, a first-person narrator that imagines other people’s lives so fully that those characters sometimes get POV. Many of the described events (especially toward the beginning of the book) feel deliciously theoretical, and the timeline is mostly in order but that order feels incidental and unimportant. Amazingly, the narrative gymnastics never outstrip Corin’s intellectual agility, her uncanny talent for turning a seeming tangent into exactly the relevant passage you didn’t know you needed. The world of the novel feels both real and unreal, perhaps due to the larding of mythical and fairytale and historical references—Repunzel and Cinderella and the Venus de Milo; griffins and Egyptian gods and Joan of Arc; Anne Boleyn and the Grimm tales and eventually, yes, Leonard Lake and Jeffrey Dahmer and Danny Rolling. It’s Hollywood, Florida some thirty-five or forty years ago, described with familiar details—orange groves, last-gasp strip malls, white-out-sniffing—but also it’s Corin’s unique creation.

As a side dish, the short documentary All That Is Sacred chronicles the period when Key West was not yet the ordered vacation spot it is today, when it was crawling with ragged outcasts and drugged-fueled artists (Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, and Thomas McGuane among them) and when tarpon fishermen numbered in the tens rather than the hundreds.