In Search of the Great Miami Novel

While Hiaasen negotiates a cease-fire, it seems a good time to segue to Hoot, his first children's book, and as much a critical and sales success last year as any of his "adult" outings. While his intent may have been merely to serve up a G-rated book for Quinn and the rest of the children in his extended family, the result has been moving. "I've gotten so many letters from kids since Hoot came out," he says. "There's no ambiguity in them, there're no shades of gray." Hoot's tale of a pancake house encroaching on a flock of endangered owls resonated loudly. "Do we try and find another place for the pancake house and save the owls?" Hiaasen asks. "Ninety-nine percent of the kids say it's wrong to kill helpless animals. That's the pure and simple view, and it's the right view. I trust a kid's instinct over a politician's any day."

You're talking to your son, right?

If we're talking about Cuban-American literature, then we're talking about writing in English," argues Ivonne Lamazares, citing her own highly touted debut novel, The Sugar Island, published in 2000. "It's a Miami story, the story of so many people who live here and who've gone through the same journey." There are plenty of Cuban exiles addressing their diaspora, she adds, but by writing in Spanish they're operating within the context of Latin American traditions. However much she adores the books of Madrid-based Zoe Valdes, "I wouldn't consider her a part of Miami literature, even if she moved here."

Lamazares is much too modest to posit her Miami story as the Miami story. And for all The Sugar Island's engaging familiarity -- a young girl raised in the cradle of the Cuban revolution finds herself uprooted to, adrift in, and finally at peace with Hialeah -- Lamazares is undoubtedly the first transplanted Habanera to open her tale with an epigram from that master of Yiddishkeit, Saul Bellow.

Still, it's worth considering: Is the Cuban-exile saga natural fodder for the Great Miami Novel? Is everything else just colorful supporting detail? After all, what is the contemporary history of this city but the story of the Cubans, many arriving with literally nothing but the shirts on their backs, transforming Miami from a Southern town into the cosmopolitan Gateway of the Americas. As local poet Carolina Hospital wryly notes in her How the Cubans Stole Miami: "Only in Miami is a Jew an Anglo." Surely then, if critic Martin Amis can say that Bellow's Chicago-based, Jewish-immigrant tale The Adventures of Augie March is "the Great American Novel, search no further," why shouldn't Cuban exiles be eligible for the same honor?

Moreover, at their best, exile stories, such as Reinaldo Arenas's breathtakingly hallucinatory memoir Before Night Falls, aren't just sterling examples of Cuban writing; they're examples of powerful writing -- period. Witness the title story of Ana Menéndez's 2001 collection, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. As Menéndez's piece builds, Máximo, once a University of Havana professor, sits in a Little Havana park, playing dominos and forlornly trading jokes. He relates the tale of Juanito, a little dog freshly arrived from Cuba, strolling past Brickell Avenue's impressive skyscrapers when he's brought up short by the sight of a gorgeous white poodle. But Juanito's dinner-date entreaties get him nowhere.

All this time the white poodle has her snout in the air. She looks at Juanito and says, "Do you have any idea who you're talking to? I am a refined breed of considerable class and you are nothing but a short, insignificant mutt." Juanito is stunned for a moment, but he rallies for the final shot. He's a proud dog, you see, and he's afraid of his pain. "Pardon me, your highness," Juanito the mangy dog says. "Here in America I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German shepherd."

Menéndez packs more effective poignancy into one short story than can be found in 44 years of newspaper op-ed clippings. Yet for all of Menéndez's ability to turn trauma into poetry, a question lingers, the same one that haunts Lamazares's work, and indeed most of their contemporaries: Where are the stories of immigrants coming of age in Miami today?

This generational gap is hardly unique to Cuban exiles. Miami-Dade College professor Geoffrey Philp, the Jamaican-born author of the novel Benjamin, My Son, remembers the reaction to his last collection of poems. He had ended that book with an ode to the Everglades, a lyrical westward gaze that prompted several of his countrymen to accuse him of "selling out." Says Philp: "When you get off the plane in Miami, your first impulse is to write of your exile. Some of my fellow writers have never moved beyond that."