Corporate America takes a beating in Date's latest tale of free enterprise run amok (after Speed Week
and Smokeout), and anyone familiar with Carl Hiaasen will recognize the caustic, over-the-top, sometimes slapstick fallout. In an alternate-universe Orlando, Whipple World is Disney, where, as David Bowie once famously sang, "Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow." Only here the Mouse, in roman à clef fashion, takes the form of a cartoon muskrat named Morty. Ernest Warner, disillusioned reporter, and Emma Whipple, the park founder's great-niece, know something fishy is going on at the amusement park and its attendant "resort community," Serenity, but aren't sure what. They just know that anyone asking questions seems to quietly disappear. Date wants to tackle everything at once in this extended polemic: the marketing machines of big business, which through merchandising create phony needs; the acquisition of the media by conglomerate interests and the subsequent replacement of reportage with Chamber of Commerce–friendly fluff; the dangers of spin and propaganda in a culture that relies increasingly upon the media to tell it what to believe. The result is a plot weighed down by didacticism and a cast of villains and rogues who lack dimension. At their worst, characters revert to stereotype, as in the offensive case of the novel's sole Asian character, who says "l" instead of "r" in hackneyed fashion. Wading bravely into the deep end of satire, the narrative may sometimes seem about to founder, but Date's hero and heroine are eminently likable, and his writing is crisp throughout. (Oct.)
