I promise I won't dump on the good people of Florida during this review of ORANGE
CRUSH, Tim Dorsey's new novel, which, by happenstance, is set in...Florida. I've heard all
the jokes and passed 'em along and, yep, I've even seen the new Florida voting booth,
which is a mockup of the Playschool farm, where you match the blocks with the
appropriately shaped openings. But the folks in Florida aren't any dumber than the folks
in Chicago, or New Orleans, or Cleveland, or a half-dozen other cities I can name. All I
can say is that if I ever run for office, I won't cry that I lost because my constituency
was so stupid that they couldn't handle a ballot. The only problem, however, is that
Dorsey quite handily, and hilariously, dumps on the good citizens of the Sunshine State
and their intellectual capacity throughout ORANGE CRUSH.
Dorsey is often compared to Carl Hiaasen, who has mined similar territory famously and
repeatedly in his many novels. The comparison is an easy one, though not altogether
appropriate; Dorsey's style is somewhere between Hiaasen's and Christopher Buckley's, and
that's not a bad place to be, not at all. Unless, of course, you're married to me and
you're finding places to hide so that you won't have to listen to me reading passages out
of context from ORANGE CRUSH or listen to me laughing at various points during the night
as I recall others. Yes, Dorsey is quite the card, and his satire is quite accurate.
ORANGE CRUSH is a mad romp through the state of Florida, dealing with the 2002
gubernatorial election between the incumbent, the benighted Marlon Conrad, and his
unlikely and somewhat unwilling opponent, Gomer Tatum. The focus here is primarily on
Conrad, who in the middle of the campaign undergoes a catharsis and begins violating,
rather successfully, every rule of campaigning in the mythical book. Along the way his
campaign bus, the ORANGE CRUSH, acquires a deadly assassin-for-hire with amnesia, a tennis
prodigy who has suddenly disappeared from the circuit, and a following that includes no
less than three individuals of disparate personalities and backgrounds looking to knock
Conrad off of this mortal coil for reasons each uniquely their own. Tatum, in the
meantime, is improbably but convincingly guided by Jackie Monroeville, who has risen above
her humble trailerpark upbringings to hitch her wagon to Tatum's dim star and, hopefully,
ride it into the Florida governor's mansion. Things begin to reach a climax when Tatum
challenges Conrad to a WWF winner-take-all wrestling match in Tampa...notice that I said
begin to reach a climax. Dorsey isn't even remotely done at that point.
ORANGE CRUSH is satire at its best. It is absurd in spots (such as between pages 1 and
303) but is nonetheless dead-on, and not just on elections, either. Dorsey's portrayal of
entrepreneur, real estate developer and NFL owner Helmut von Zeppelin should be encased
under glass and preserved for eternity. As should be the rest of ORANGE CRUSH.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
© Copyright 1996-2010, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
