Customer Reviews

Big Trouble.

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As the many readers of his column know, Dave Barry has a sideways sort of sense of humor. And, as much as he loves Miami, he's certainly not blind to the failings of his home town, where gun-ownership is a given. His first novel is part Marx Brothers, part Carl Hiaasen, part Goofy-on-dope, all set in the Miami suburb of Coconut Grove. Eliot Arnold is an ex-newsman struggling to make it with his small advertising agency, while his teenaged son, Matt, plays "Killer" with squirt guns. Matt's intended victim, Jenny, is the daughter of Arthur Herk, vice-president and bag man for a thoroughly corrupt and murderous local corporation, whose days may be numbered as a result of his not-bright embezzling. And there's Puggy, a street person living in a tree in the Herk's walled yard, who has a thing for their illegal maid, Nina. Puggy also works (sort of) for two Russian ex-army chislers who own a run-down bar as a front for their arms-dealing operation. And there's Snake and Eddie, small-time grifters who decide to make a big score -- bigger than they know, unfortunately. And there's FBI agents and assorted cops and several overlapping love stories and a very suspicious metal suitcase. (Now I've gotta see the movie!)

If the Marx brothers could have teamed up with the Keystone Cops in a 21st Century cops and robbers episode in print they might have picked Big Trouble as a nice fit. Puggy, a benign version of the modern `street person' phenomenon, drifts to Miami to find himself at home living in a tree over the fence separating the family a wealthy low-level gangster from the world of consequences. He stumbles into a job in a run-down bar owned by two ex-Russian gunrunners dealing in stolen Soviet arms, and so begins one of the funnier dead-serious books I've read this century. A kid in a squirt-gun assassin game tangled into the activities of real-live hit-men, a man-woman Miami's finest cop team tightroping it between battles of the sexes and societal chaos all combine to make this a readable, laughable, believable book you might even put aside to read again a year from now..

Carrying on in the tradition of Irma Bomback and Art Buchwald, Dave Berry certainly qualifies as one of the great American humorists of our time. His newspaper column has a unique cadence that allows the reader to easily imagine the writer's voice brilliantly describing the mundane and ironic challenges of marriage, parenthood, and citizenship.

In Big Trouble, however, that distinct voice seems muted. What remains is a generic, paint-by-numbers aping of Get Shorty, a formulaic caper comedy peopled with cliché-spouting stereotypes. The book reads exactly like the kind of movie you might pick up at Blockbuster when all the latest titles are checked out. And, to be sure, that's exactly the kind of movie Big Trouble turned out to be: an unsurprising, mildly amusing piece of fluff.

I'm a huge Dave Berry fan. His essays on contemporary family life and observations on our loopy culture are dazzlingly side-splitting. Fiction, I'm afraid, seems (at least in the case of Big Trouble) to be more than a bit outside Berry's wheelhouse. A swiiiiing... and a miss.

Rand Bishop, author of Makin' Stuff Up, The Absolute Essentials of Songwriting Success, and the novel/mock memoir, Grand Pop.

If you like florida mystery/humor books you will love this. Laugh out loud funny!

This might have been a fun book if it had been more decent, but it just went too far. It deserves an R rating, and I find nothing at all amusing about that. I threw it in the trash before I was half done. And I won't pick up any more of Barry's fiction unless I have reason to believe it's no worse than a PG-13.