Telling the Truth by Lying

I'm reading Carl Hiaasen's Sick Puppy right now. Like most Hiaasen novels, it's about corrupt politicians and business people in Southwest Florida. His style is hyper-real, which is to say that crazy, quasi-unbelievable stuff is always happening to crazy, quasi-unbelievable characters. You've got your developers with Barbie doll fetishes, your lobbyists who hunt injured animals in staged "safaris," and, of course you've got Skink, Hiaasen's repeat character, a former Florida governor who now lives in the wild eating roadkill and enacting vengeance whenever possible.What I love about Hiaasen--other than the humor and the flamboyantly sick characters--is the way he paints a kind of truth about a place and its inhabitants through exaggeration. Hiaasen's also a journalist and claims to base a lot of his fiction on the actual goings-on among Florida's most corrupt individuals. But to really give us the feel and flavor of the place requires more than reportage. With journalism, you can only report what you can see and hear. You can't necessarily get into the souls of the players. That takes artistic license. And that's why his novels reveal a deeper truth than any journalistic reporting can.Also, in journalism you can only write about righteous vengeance being rained down on the bad guys if that's what actually happens. It so seldom does. But in fiction, you can make it so.Which is why I'm a novelist and not a journalist.