Literature / Skinny Dip

Skinny Dip is a satirical thriller novel by Carl Hiaasen, first published in 2004.

Chaz Perrone attempts to murder his wife, Joey, by pushing her overboard during an ocean cruise to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Joey survives and, after drifting for hours, is fished out of the sea by Mick Stranahan, a retired investigator now living a reclusive existence on a remote island. With Stranahan's help, Joey sets out to get back at Chaz and to discover why he tried to kill her — taking full advantage of the fact that Chaz now believes her to be dead.

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This novel contains examples of:

• All for Nothing: Chaz has been planted in the state water management district to fake the results from outflow from Red Hammernut's farms; but he's stuck with his state salary and gets nothing for his corruption except the occasional cash gift from Red. Red has promised him a highly-paid position with Red's company after the scam is "finished" but Chaz (even knowing how ruthless Red is in business) has never stopped to consider that, once Chaz stops faking the water data, Red will have no further use for him;
  • Played with when Chaz receives the phony will, purportedly leaving Joey's entire $13 million fortune to him: "The irony would be epic, for Joey wouldn't have left him a dime if she'd known about his faking the water data. Meaning he had murdered her for no reason... or at least the wrong reason."
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: When Joey confronts her husband for trying to murder her, she also berates him for throwing away all her possessions after he thought she was gone: "all my clothes, my pictures and my books! Even my orchid!"
• Attending Your Own Funeral: Averted. Joey wants to attend her own funeral (in disguise) in order to interrogate Chaz about why he tried to kill her. Stranahan convinces her to wait in the car.
• Badass Boast: Joey's reaction to her husband calling her a "nosy bitch": "I told him if he ever spoke to me that way again, I'd reach down his throat and pull out his testicles one at a time."
• Being Evil Sucks: Chaz tries to kill his wife to protect his crooked dealings with Red Hammernut; when he thinks he's succeeded, he suffers impotence for the first time in his life (since sex with her was the only part of the marriage he was really attached to).
• Believing Your Own Lies:
  • Chad may have a PhD (financed by Red), but as Skink says to him, "if you're a real scientist, then I'm Goldie Hawn." Yet he insists on being addressed as "Doctor Perrone", not "Mister";
  • Red Hammernut thinks of how much "toil" is associated with being a Corrupt Corporate Executive - supervising gangs of underpaid migrant workers, "soaking taxpayers for dirt-cheap loans", and "countless hours of ass-kissing... with the same knucklehead politicians" and gripes, "and they wonder how come the American farmer is a dying breed!" Which prompts his former Dragon, Tool, to reflect, "looking at Red's buffed fingernails and bleached teeth, Tool wondered when was the last time he'd touched a shovel or a hoe."
• Black Comedy Rape: Averted. Chaz, trapped in the Everglades, is terrified of being eaten by an alligator, then remembers from undergraduate biology that many species of snakes and lizards have two penises, and starts to dread that alligators are similarly endowed (they aren't).
• Character Overlap: Mick Stranahan was a lead character in Hiaasen's earlier novel Skin Tight; several other characters from that novel also make appearances. There is also an appearance by Hiaasen's frequently-recurring character "Skink".
• Comically Missing the Point: When Joey confronts her husband, she angrily berates him for not only trying to murder her, but also throwing away all her belongings after she was gone. He tries to placate her by offering to return her jewelry (which he kept because it was much too valuable to throw away). She is not placated.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Red Hammernut hires everyone from crooked hydrologists to hitmen to keep his farming operation looking clean enough on paper that he doesn't have to spend money on pollution controls.
• Disappointed by the Motive: When Joey finally confronts a (drugged) Chaz, demanding to know why he tried to murder her:
  Chaz: I thought you were going to rat me out for faking the water tests.
  Joey: But I didn't even know what you were doing!
  Chaz: So maybe I overreacted.
• The Dog Bites Back: After Chaz escapes (partially with Tool's connivance), Red makes the unwise decision to berate him relentlessly, and finally slap him across the top of his head during a brief roadside stop. Tool finds the gesture "covey[s] an intolerable lack of respect" and reacts appropriately.
• Even Evil Has Standards: A corrupt and absolutely crooked man though he may be, even Red is disgusted by the (fake) video footage of Chaz tossing Joey from the Sun Duchess in cold blood. Later, when Chaz blames the crumbling of their operation on his presumed-dead wife instead of his own idiocy in a desperate plea for his life, Red outright calls him an evil little bastard. Ditto for Tool, who generally Would Not Hit a Girl (unless she started it first).
• Forging the Will: Mick Stranahan forges a will in the name of presumed-dead Joey, leaving $13 million to her husband, as a ploy to find out just how greedy he really is. Joey would never have lavished such money on her scumbag of a husband as long as she was alive.
• Gaslighting: Chaz is driven insane in many small ways by Joey, whom he thought he had killed.
• Goodbye, Cruel World!: Chaz writes a fake suicide note, intending to cover his tracks as he flees the country, but karma catches up with him first. Characteristically, he is too lazy to write it himself, so he cobbles it together from various internet sources, including a cryptic reference to ballerina Anna Pavlova's alleged Last Words, "Get my swan costume ready!"
• Good News, Bad News: Chaz, staring at the forged will, leaving his wife's entire fortune to him, silently calls it "the ultimate good-news-bad-news joke":
  The good news? Your dead wife left you 13 million bucks. The bad news? The cop who thinks you murdered her finally found a motive.
• Humiliation Conga: The second-to-last chapter has Chaz hopelessly slogging through the Everglades, ruing how his former friends all turned against him, especially the ones he had tried and failed to kill. He escapes from his tormentors, only to meet for the first time the last person he'll ever see.
• Ignored Epiphany: Having tried and failed to murder three people (including his own wife), having his co-conspirator turn on him and order him killed to keep him silent, and forced to flee for his life into the hostile territory of the Everglades, Chaz still doesn't understand why the world won't stop picking on him:
  Chaz saw no irony in his own plight, having always regarded himself as more of a bystander than a villain in the poisoning of the wilderness. Blaming the demise of the Everglades on science whores such as himself seemed as silly to Chaz as blaming lung cancer on the medical doctors employed by tobacco companies, who for generations had insisted cigarettes were harmless... Do I deserve this? Chaz wondered. Really? He ran a forefinger along one of his shins, skimming off the muck like chocolate icing. Holding it to his nose, he detected no noxious or rancid odor. Even if this gunk is loaded with fertilizers, so what? It's just mud, for God's sake. It's not like I was clubbing baby harp seals.
• Ignored Expert: Hiaasen recounts in scathing detail how the State of Florida spent a century dredging, draining, and otherwise eradicating 90% of the original Everglades, but it was not until the late 20th century when a series of severe droughts "shattered the cocksure assumption that there would always be plenty of water to steal":
  Those whose fortunes depended on luring homebuyers and tourists to South Florida now contemplated the dreadful possibility that the infernal granola-head environmentalists had been correct all along.
• In-Universe Factoid Failure: Chaz tries to kill Joey by pushing her off a ship, figuring the Gulf Stream will wash her body out to sea. But (as the book's own jacket synopsis notes) Chaz "is the only marine scientist on Earth who doesn't know which way the Gulf Stream flows." Rather than out to sea, Joey washes up on the Florida coast and naturally wants payback. It takes a random comment from a girl he's trying to pick up in a bar for Chaz to realize his mistake.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Joey doesn't want to murder her husband (even after he tried to murder her), as much as she wants to understand why he did it in the first place, and why he married her if he had so little regard for her; his answers, extracted under the influence of drugs, fail to satisfy her.
• Karmic Death: Chaz escapes a murder attempt by Red by fleeing into the Everglades - the place that he fears and loathes more than any other on Earth - without food, water, or clothes, then is "rescued" by the man who happened to have saved one of his would-be victims from drowning and knows all about his sordid history. Averted in that Chaz himself remains entirely oblivious to the karmic symmetry of his plight, seeing himself as an eternal victim of his own bad luck.
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: One of the symptoms of Chaz's disquiet after Joey starts haunting him.
  For the first time in their relationship—in any relationship—Chaz had heard that most hollow and dreaded of consolations: "Don't worry, it happens to everybody."... Even digitally remastered, "Bad to the Bone" could not rally Chaz's bone to its usual badness.
• Morality Pet: Maureen, a lonely hospice patient that he meets while on the hunt for secondhand fentanyl patches, quickly becomes one to Tool. The memoirs and lessons she imparts on him gradually inspire a Heel–Face Turn, and part of the book ends with him rescuing her from the awful facility she had been living in.
• Nature Is Not Nice: Chaz, a marine biologist by profession, actually loathes the outdoors, especially the Everglades he is required to work in;
  • Chaz was pre-med in college, but he was such a lazy student that he failed to qualify, and instead graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in biology; studying for a master's degree in Marine Biology, he expected to be sipping cocktails on the deck of a sailboat while playing with dolphins, but instead was assigned to collect and examine sea lice, which "colonized his upper torso with an itchy, pustular rash", leading him to inform his faculty supervisor "that the only sensible purpose for studying sea lice was to isolate a toxin that would wipe them off the face of the earth";
  • Playing the role of a biologist for the state water management district requires Chaz to collect water samples from the Everglades; before wading into the swamp, he thrashes the water with a golf club and yells at the top of his lungs to scare away any and all wildlife that might be lurking nearby;
  • Fleeing from both Joey and his former employer, Red Hammernut, Chaz is forced to enter the swamp naked and spend the night hiding there, tormented by fatigue, dehydration, and nightmares of being eaten and possibly raped by alligators;
  • When he is picked up by the Recurring Character Skink, who knows all about his villainous behavior, Chaz asks what the stranger plans to do to him, and Skink replies with a quote from Alfred, Lord Tennyson: "Nature, red in tooth and claw."
• Never My Fault: Having tried, without success, to murder his wife, his mistress, and Red's Dragon "Tool", Chaz still doesn't think it's fair that they're all collaborating to ruin his life.
• No Sympathy: While channel-surfing in Chaz's home, Tool finds an episode of Oprah, featuring three movie actresses who are all bemoaning what a hassle it is to be famous, with paparazzi and Loony Fans following them everywhere, even to the grocery store. Tool quickly decides that he does not feel the least bit sorry for any of them, since they are wealthy enough to afford bodyguards and walls around their mansions, and unconsciously compares their "plight" to that of the elderly cancer patient he met at a local hospice:
  There's someone would trade places with them actresses in a heartbeat, Maureen would. She'd be smilin' and wavin' at them photographers, she'd be so grateful not to be sick.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Chaz arrogantly insists on being addressed as "Dr. Perrone", then immediately has to explain that he's not a physician, especially when Tool keeps bugging him to write a prescription for painkiller.
• Removed from the Picture: Joey secretly returns to Chaz's house and, using cuticle scissors, cuts herself out of a wedding picture, which she places under his pillow. Stranahan immediately recognizes this as a typical feminine ploy; apparently, it happened to him with his third wife.
• Revealing Cover-Up: Chaz tried to murder Joey because he thought she had realized that he was faking his environmental impact assessments on Red's businesses. In truth she was totally ignorant of that, but her efforts to find out why he tried to kill her ultimately exposes it anyway.
• Revenge Romance: After she sleeps with Stranahan for the first time, Joey worries aloud that she only did it to get back at her cheating, murderous husband. Stranahan tells her not to overanalyze it.
  Joey: But what if I just jumped your bones because I was furious at Chaz?
  Mick: Then I owe him, bless his blackened cinder of a soul.
• Sexual Karma: Partially deconstructed in Skinny Dip. Chaz Perrone is a Sex God—even after his incompetent attempt to murder her, Joey still admits this—but she's well aware that he only cared about her enjoyment as a way of feeding his own ego, and is pleasantly surprised by her new physical relationship with the protagonist, Mick Stranahan:

  While Mick wasn't as robotically durable as her husband, he was far more attentive, tender and enterprising. For Joey it was something of a revelation. With Mick, there was no furtive peeking at his own clenched buttocks in the mirror, no collegial exhorting of his manhood, no self-congratulatory rodeo yells when he was finished. In Chaz's embrace Joey had often felt like a pornographic accessory, one of those rubber mail-order vaginas. With Mick, she was an actual participant; a lover. The orgasms had been quake-like with Chaz, but then he would immediately demand to hear all about them; he was always more interested in the reviews than in the intimacies. With Mick, the climax was no less intense, but the aftermath was sweeter, because he never broke the mood by asking her to grade his performance.

• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Joey doesn't want to kill her husband (even after he tried to murder her); all she wants is to know (1) why he did it, and (2) why he would marry a woman he never really loved.
  Chaz: Because you were hot. And we were so fantastic together.
  Joey: Because I was hot?
  Joey eyed the lamp's electrical cord and thought, no jury in the country would convict me.
• This Is a Work of Fiction:
  This is a work of fiction. All names and characters are either invented or used fictitiously. The events described are mostly imaginary, except for the destruction of the Florida Everglades and the $8 billion effort to save what remains.
• This Is Reality:
  • Mick, arguing against Joey's initial plan to rush back to Miami and surprise her husband in the shower;
    Mick: Please listen to me. You can't kill your husband and get away with it just because everyone thinks you're dead. That kind of nonsense only happens in the movies.
  • Likewise, Joey's brother, Corbett, and Mick both firmly veto her idea of showing up at her own funeral to appraise Chaz's reaction, even when she promises to disguise herself;
    Corbett: Joey, this isn't The Lucy Show. The man tried to murder you.
• Tragic Keepsake: Inverted. As soon as he gets home from the cruise ship, Chaz starts boxing all of Joey's clothes, makeup, and other belongings, and hustles them to the dump. It's one of several clues that deepens Rolvaag's conviction that Chaz didn't love his wife. Joey, when she enters their home, is simultaneously enraged and heartbroken at how nonchalantly her husband "erased" her from the house.
  This was my home, Mick. My life! And he's just sweeping me out the door like I was dirt.
• Woman Scorned: The novel is all about Joey Perrone getting revenge on her husband Chaz, who pushed her into the Atlantic Ocean on a cruise. She takes full advantage of being presumed dead.
• You Do Not Want To Know: on a helicopter ride out to the Everglades to view Chaz's empty Hummer, this exchange takes place:
  Captain Gallo: Karl, I need some friendly guidance here.
  Rolvaag: What do you want to know?
  Captain Gallo: That's my question: what do I want to know?
  [later, on the ride back]
  Captain Gallo: I need an answer, Karl. Right now.
  Rolvaag: All right, here it is: if I were you, I would definitely not want to know what I know.
• You Watch Too Much X: When Chaz tries to shoot his girlfriend Ricca, he aims the pistol with both hands, "like he'd seen a thousand times on television." Since he's never fired a gun before, his first shot misses completely, while his second only wounds his victim in the thigh, non-fatally.

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