Ken Wells’ “Crawfish Mountain” reads like a Cajun rehash of a southern-fried comedy from the ’70s.
Except for a few pages of environmental boilerplate, there’s little here that wouldn’t please fans of “Smokey and the Bandit” or “The Dukes of Hazzard.” There’s kidnapping by RV, lots of crack navigation (some of it in a canoe with a paddle), and a tiny dog who foils the bad guy by biting him in the rear. There’s the familiar cast of buffoonish villains, venal politicians, round-heeled secretaries, handsome outlaw heroes, and wisdom-spouting country folk. There’s lots of heavily applied local color and plenty of homespun mother-wit.
Wells grew up in Louisiana, but his characters talk the way an old Hollywood screenwriter would imagine Southerners talk. They use that favored trope of hayseed comedies, the regionally appropriate simile: The Cajun characters say things like “more popular than boiled crawfish,” “I’m as beat as a drum at a Mardi Gras parade,” and “like an oyster at rising tide.” The Texas characters say things like “working like a herd dog at a cattle convention” and “like a cowboy on a buckin’ bronc.”
And like any over-the-top comedy, this one does your laughing for you. The writer punches up his tired material with italics and exclamation points the way a sitcom dials up the laugh track.
“Crawfish Mountain” takes place in Louisiana’s Catahoula Bayou, five years before the arrival of Hurricane Katrina.
Tom Huff, the diminutive vice president of Big Tex oil company, wants to run a pipeline through Crawfish Mountain, an island fishing camp bequeathed to good- hearted Cajun Justin Pitrie by his grandfather. The simple yet wily Justin has no intention of selling the island. Huff sends his foul- breathed, gold-chain-wearing henchman, Juke Charpentier, and a series of more menacing heavies to get his way.
When that doesn’t work, Huff pressures Joe T. Evangeline, the affable, feckless governor, to close the deal. Evangeline, a willing accomplice for the oil companies up to now, begins to see the conservationist light when its case is put by the comely Julie Galjour, general counsel for his Department of Environmental Protection.
But Huff has some potentially damaging information that will cause the governor to make a difficult choice between his newly discovered principles and his political career.
Throw in some illicit waste dumping, a crusty conservationist and the corrupt reports of a few “biostitutes,” and you have a book that, aside from its debt to hayseed comedy, strongly resembles one of Carl Hiaasen’s environmentally themed comic thrillers.
Hiaasen, one of those rare writers lucky enough to have invented his own genre, has a pitch-perfect sense of how to balance the thrills and the comedy. The thrills come from the ingeniously orchestrated plots. The comedy comes mostly from the fresh, laconic dialogue and characters who while not exactly the fully rounded figures we expect in a serious novel are not caricatures, either. Unlike Wells, Hiaasen also realizes that comedy has the shortest half-life of any genre: What was funny yesterday isn’t necessarily funny today.
As if to leave no doubt that “Crawfish Mountain” is a comedy with a message, Wells writes in his acknowledgments:
“Not all books have goals, but I did have one here: to attempt to tell a fun story about a serious subject, the decimation of the Louisiana wetlands, which has been under siege from a variety of mostly man-made forces over the past several decades.”
The reader wishes that Wells, a respected journalist and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his series on the destruction of the Florida Everglades, had jettisoned the humor and told the story straight.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw famously compared his own “message” comedies to bitter pills made palatable by a sweet sugar coating. In “Crawfish Mountain,” the pill is easy enough to swallow — who doesn’t support the survival of the white ibis or the preservation of hallowed fishing grounds? It’s the sugar coating that leaves a bad aftertaste.
John Broening is a Denver-based freelance writer.
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Fiction
Crawfish Mountain, by Ken Wells, $25.95
