How can a novelist address our current moment without sacrificing the pleasures of fiction? Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach answer that question in different, equally impressive ways. Both novels are informed by the grotesque and infuriating nature of contemporary public life, yet they are so surprising and funny that it may take us a while to register how seriously they take the escalating violence, rampant corruption, and class resentment poisoning our society. Both reflect a deep passion for a particular place—Johnson’s Middle Tennessee, Hiaasen’s South Florida—and a mixture of exasperation and grief at the destruction of the natural world to make room for megamansions and toxic waste dumps. And both reckon with the extent to which historical ignorance and the calculated distortion of the past threaten the foundation on which our country was built.

At the start of Bloodline, a former used car salesman, Winston Alcorn, has moved his wife, Mandy, and their two young sons from Lexington, Kentucky, to rural Lebanon, Tennessee. They’re living in their van near the Cumberland River, which emerges from the Appalachian Mountains in forks that “join in the foothills like estranged brothers,” then “continues snaking westward, twisting and falling through the rolling region and finally dropping down into Tennessee.” The older son, Dustin, barely speaks, and baby James is wearing a grocery bag for a diaper. “Ain’t much opportunity in this world for boys like you,” their father tells them.

Playing on the sympathy of the owner of the local sawmill, Winston leverages his family’s plight to talk his way into a job. On his first day at work and only twelve pages into Johnson’s novel, Winston saws off his right hand. On purpose. Obviously it’s an insurance scam, but Winston is no ordinary grifter. He views his auto-amputation as the opening sally in a campaign to right a historic wrong. He has come to claim what’s his.

As a child, he was taught by his mother to see his glorious stolen birthright embodied in the equestrian statue of the Confederate general John Hunt Morgan on the courthouse lawn of Cheapside Park in downtown Lexington. “That’s who we’re from,” she said, as young Winston ran his finger over the bronze letters on the plaque:

Later, his autodidactic research provided no hint of his mother’s claim to this lineage, but he needed it to be true so badly, felt it in his bones so deeply, that he decided it couldn’t be false, had to be correct, and just like that he began believing he really did have blood in the game.

Winston is certain that the South will rise again and that he has been chosen to hasten its ascent. His mission seamlessly combines profiteering and prophecy: “Check this out. Jesus started as a carpenter, right? Then he disappeared, right? Where’d he go to? Now think about it. He was probably negotiating an out-of-court settlement against his old boss.”

Predictably the sawmill owner, Miss Becka, has let her insurance lapse. By the time Winston is discharged from the hospital, Mandy has found a sympathetic lawyer, and Miss Becka’s property—the mill, the house, the land, and the rotting ferry on which General Morgan is said to have made a daring escape from Union soldiers—all belongs to the Alcorns. The prosthesis Winston chooses is a garish pink rubber hand, larger than the one he lost—a highly visible symbol of his sacrifice. He rechristens himself, adding a letter to his first name that turns it into an aspirational mantra: “You’re a new man now. You’ve been cleansed by blood and so has the land. You don’t win a little. You Wins-a-ton.”

Wins-a-ton seems less like the heir of the Southern generals he reveres than like a descendant of Abner Snopes, the sharecropper who, in William Faulkner’s classic 1939 story “Barn Burning,” is also driven by a sense of restorative justice. Bloodline and “Barn Burning” are set in similar territory: the battlefield of white-on-white Southern class war. Johnson’s characters, like the residents of Faulkner’s native Mississippi—and the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, in which much of his work is set—have yet to recover from the wounds inflicted by the Civil War, and they consider it their duty to pass the pain down to the next generation. While Snopes resorts to arson to punish the landowners he believes have wronged him, Winston has a more sophisticated set of instruments in his toolbox: entrepreneurship, illegal gun sales, and, most importantly, populism.

Like Abner Snopes, who assumes that his young son, Colonel Sartoris “Sarty” Snopes, will lie to cover up his crimes, Winston Alcorn believes that rage and resentment are dynastic, that Dustin and James will do whatever is necessary to further his agenda. He is convinced that he’s living in two time periods at once: the degraded present and the exalted Civil War past. His personality is likewise divided: visionary and pragmatic, brutal and tenderhearted. The fierce, predatory dad muses sweetly about his baby son, whom Mandy brings to the hospital after Winston’s “accident”:

There’s something in his little face that makes Winston have a feeling that’s akin to pain but minus the pain. What is it? This baby thinks his daddy’s worthwhile. He loves him and just can’t help it. Despite what Daddy’s put him through…James believes in his pure beating heart that this man lying right here in front of him, Daddy Winsaton, is a good man. It surprises the hell out of Winston to see it all so clearly in his little face, even the natural propensity to believe a flat-out lie.

Johnson provides Winston with the props necessary to amplify his most abrasive traits: guns in holsters strapped around his waist and a bullhorn he uses to intimidate his wife and boys and to address the crowds at the weekly auctions where he sells everything from rusted equipment, aquariums, and a dollhouse, “all the way up to a female mannequin who was dotted with cigarette burns and had a pentagram carved into her crotch.” Winston takes advantage of the “fast-growing market for items that always sell: pistols and assault rifles without serial numbers,” assuring his customers that “these guns are the only thing between you and your stuff and everybody who wants your stuff.”

The hugely popular auctions are just rungs on the ladder that Winston intends to climb. His plan involves restoring the Confederate rescue ferry and sailing it down the Cumberland River, broadcasting speeches that will rouse voters angered by the town’s removal of the statue of the Confederate general Robert H. Hatton, which Winston salvages and installs on the boat.

Hoping to inspire a movement that will send him to the Tennessee House of Representatives, Winston stages a rally at which he arrives “perched on some sort of royal throne and wearing a W cap while pumping his bullhorn in the air with his good hand and waving to the crowd with the rubber one.” A speaker from the Sons of Confederate Veterans explains why Wins-a-ton is the right man to heal the nation:

He’s pushed back against the communists who want to erase who we are and where we come from. The blood we shed on this very soil. He’s given voice to the monuments and the men of our past, and because of that he’s the man for our future!

Though Winston’s rhetoric may remind us of Donald Trump’s, the president’s name goes unmentioned, and the novel works to challenge and complicate the facile assumptions that blue-state readers might make about their red-state neighbors. The South is Johnson’s home territory. He grew up in Tennessee, in a family of bluegrass musicians, and toured with a string band. He understands and loves the landscape, the culture, the bars with names like the Bomb Shelter. Steeped in the history and geography of the region, he chooses his locations with care. In the background, but never stated in the novel, is the fact that Lexington’s Cheapside Park, from which the statue of General Morgan was removed in 2017, was the site of a major slave market in the antebellum South. In 2020 a controversy over the removal of the statue of General Hatton divided the community of Lebanon, where the monument still stands.

Bloodline is Johnson’s second novel. His first, Nitro Mountain (2016), which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is set in a Virginia backwater that’s a more ravaged and polluted version of Lebanon. It features two damaged yet appealing musicians and the former girlfriend of one of them, a survivor of sexual abuse now in thrall to a psychopathic drug dealer. Its bleak comedy is similar to that of Bloodline, but its equally disturbing conclusion never makes us feel, as this novel does, that justice—raw and lawless, but justice nonetheless—has been served.

As in Nitro Mountain, the characters in Bloodline are richly drawn, especially Miss Becka, whose passion for the region runs as deep as Winston’s but who is, in every other way, his opposite. Having lost everything to the Alcorns, she maintains a watchful, custodial relationship with the land and is sustained by her belief in the mystical power of country music:

Those old family harmonies were bound by blood. You could hear it. And while singing with her father, she sometimes could find the magical vibrating closeness that she heard on his records, within which a phantom voice would emerge, a third presence, something turning the duo into a trio, a trinity almost holy—father, daughter, holy ghost—and proof that classic country was nothing short of alchemy.

The Alcorns’ crimes against her extend beyond the theft of her land and livelihood. They recklessly trap, cook, and sell the schools of river fish that she has tenderly nurtured in a reservoir along one of the Cumberland’s tributaries. Miss Becka is the moral conscience of the novel, and as James comes of age, he sees in her the possibilities of a more thoughtful and less criminal way of life, while Winston views their growing closeness as an act of treason.

Like “Barn Burning,” Bloodline honors the courage and determination it takes for sons to avoid becoming their fathers. Though Dustin is finally too damaged to overcome his violent heritage, we feel that James will escape. Even so, his arc seems unlikely to resemble that of Tara Westover, whose popular memoir, Educated, tracks her progress from abuse and isolation in rural Idaho to a doctorate at the University of Cambridge. And it would be difficult to envision young James Alcorn on the career path trod by J.D. Vance, whose Hillbilly Elegy starts off with a series of humble-brags about how far its author has come: “The coolest thing I’ve done, at least on paper, is graduate from Yale Law School, something thirteen-year-old J.D. Vance would have considered ludicrous.” In books about rural, poor, white American communities, success most often means getting smart and getting out. Bloodline suggests that escaping the gravitational pull of one’s background is considerably more complicated.

Despite the critical success of Johnson’s first novel, Bloodline was rejected by every major publishing house to which it was submitted. In a video available on YouTube, Johnson recalls editors saying that they admired the novel but felt unable to publish it because of the “current cultural climate.” It’s unclear what this meant. Did editors fear that the book’s portrayal of a MAGA-like movement, of gun culture, of a leader whose oratory echoes our president’s, of the South’s nostalgic attachment to its Confederate legacy, and of two political assassinations, one bogus and one real, might offend readers at a moment when outrage can so easily go viral? Eventually Bloodline was published by a new imprint, Panamerica, started—under the auspices of County Highway magazine—by Gary Fisketjon, the editor who, at Knopf, had worked with Johnson on Nitro Mountain.

No such reluctance accompanied the publication of Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach, though it is much more pointedly and wickedly critical of the “current cultural climate” than Bloodline. It made the New York Times best seller list last spring, its popularity fueled partly by the fact that, over the past forty-five years, Hiaasen’s eighteen previous novels (three written with the journalist William Montalbano) and seven books for younger readers have attracted a large and deservedly loyal readership.

Hiaasen grew up in Florida and for much of his career was a reporter and columnist for the Miami Herald. His fiction is hard to categorize. Some of his books are mysteries, such as Bad Monkey (2013) and Squeeze Me (2020), in which the action is precipitated by a suspicious death. But we don’t read them to find out who committed the crime any more than we read Great Expectations to discover the identity of Pip’s benefactor.

We’re drawn to Hiaasen because his books are so alive, so inventive, so cleverly constructed, with multiple fast-moving plotlines that somehow come together. He writes heroines whose toughness and snappy comebacks recall the smart gals played by Barbara Stanwyck and Lauren Bacall, while his heroes tend to be idealistic, attractive bad boys with idiosyncratic and occasionally illegal approaches to environmental activism. Hiaasen has a low tolerance for fraudulence and stupidity, qualities that reign supreme among his huge cast of malevolent eccentrics, bumbling con men, bogus reality TV stars, and crooked politicians.

Fever Beach is set in the fictitious town of Tangelo Shores, Florida. As it opens, a white supremacist named Dale Figgo is driving around, tossing antisemitic leaflets (“Holocaust” is spelled with a k) into gated neighborhoods. Figgo and his friend Jonas Onus are rivals for the leadership of the Strokerz for Liberty, a ragtag band of loser-bigots:

Onus’s story was that he’d been passed over for a promotion at the Houston fire department because a firefighter of mixed race had applied for the same job. Figgo, meanwhile, claimed that his dream of a college education had been dashed when the University of Miami had rejected his application, undoubtedly to make room for a Jew or a Black. He didn’t mention the manifest deficiencies in his high-school transcript.

Onus is gainfully unemployed, thanks to a manufactured disability claim; Figgo works at a sex doll factory, shipping appalling numbers of “wheat-hued” rubber mannequins named Darcy’s Dream Booty.

Both men think of the January 6 Capitol riot with shame and regret. Onus missed the insurrection when his young son swallowed a baby turtle and had to be rushed to the ER. Figgo, who participated in the siege, was kicked out of the Proud Boys after he posted a video of himself gleefully smearing feces on a statue of a Confederate veteran and “lifelong crusader against equal rights for Blacks” because he’d mistaken the bearded warrior for Ulysses S. Grant. The group’s political activities mostly involve assembling on the beach, where they get drunk, crawl around in the sand, and drearily recount “personal experiences of discrimination and oppression for the benefit of Jews, Blacks, Muslims, Asians, gays, nonbinaries, transgenders, immigrants, and pederast liberals.” But their mission gets a boost when they attract the attention of Clure Boyette, a corrupt, ambitious, dim-witted congressman with a fondness for canine-themed kinky sex.

Boyette’s campaign has declared war on the people “indoctrinating our children, normalizing sexual perversion, inviting drug dealers and sodomites across our borders, and forcing us all to drive electric F-150s.” And he has figured out how the Strokerz might be useful in the upcoming congressional election. They can hang around polling sites, intimidating voters who might have come to support a rival, more liberal candidate.

It comes as a shock to realize that Hiaasen has anticipated the threat of the moment, the worry that Trump will try to undermine the midterm elections by stationing ICE agents near the polls to scare away citizens of color and people who look likely to vote for Democrats.

Hiaasen has been referred to as a satirist, a term that might suggest a certain lack of depth, an insufficient tragic sense. It’s true that he seems to have little interest in the painful domestic fractures that run through Bloodline. The family dynamics in Fever Beach mostly involve the senior Boyette’s perpetual disappointment in his idiot son, and violent Dale Figgo being terrorized by his even more brutal mother. Yet Hiaasen makes us care deeply about his characters—and even more deeply about the natural world that some of them are fighting to protect. We’re rooting for Twilly Spree, Fever Beach’s nervy environmentalist-saboteur who, together with his girlfriend, Viva Morales, is determined to defeat the real estate developers planning to raze a citrus grove to make room for the Bunkers, a massive, “exclusively curated” residential community.

Hiaasen is an expert at writing bar fights, mistaken identities, kidnappings, and cross-country chases, and he seems to enjoy making bullies get their comeuppance. In one of the novel’s most satisfying scenes, a band of homophobic neo-Nazis invades Trauma Queens, a nightclub in Key West, and is humiliatingly beaten by a troupe of buff, pugnacious drag performers. His books are funny not only because he puts his risible characters in ridiculous situations but also because he encourages us to laugh at people who, in real life, would simply seem like monsters.

Among the most odious denizens of Tangelo Shores are Claude and Electra Mink, two ancient, desiccated, superrich, unpleasant alcoholics. The Minks used to be moderate Democrats, but

the couple’s swing to the political right had been abrupt and vengeful, spurred by an inferior table assignment at a Washington gala to which they’d donated two hundred thousand dollars…. Electra and Claude stalked out before the first course—a grilled-pear salad—was served. The next morning they flew back to Florida and switched their voter registrations to Republican.

The Minks are funding an organization called the Wee Hammers, dedicated to putting electric drills in the hands of grade school kids, teaching them to build houses and become self-sufficient. This fake charity, established so Boyette can secretly funnel money to the Strokerz, implodes when one of the little builders uses a blowtorch as a lightsaber and begins slashing at his young coworkers.

Johnson’s and Hiaasen’s novels—one lyrical, melancholy, yet frequently humorous, the other broadly antic—remind us of the ease with which class resentment can be weaponized to incite violence and garner support for manipulative politicians who put their private interests above the public good. Reading them, we may notice how rarely contemporary fiction offers us a glimpse into the tormented souls of men like Wins-a-ton Alcorn and Dale Figgo. I can understand the extraliterary reasons why editors might have hesitated to publish Bloodline,but right now it seems wise for all of us staring across a political chasm to have more interest in, and information about, the inner lives of the Americans on the opposite side. Both books might inspire us to read and reread Faulkner and, in particular, “Barn Burning,” which has made me see the eyes of Abner Snopes peering over the masks worn by the ICE agents terrorizing American cities.

Lately I keep thinking about Emily Dickinson’s line “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” How grateful we are for novels like these, for how slyly and honestly they portray the world in which we are shocked to find ourselves living. Lee Clay Johnson and Carl Hiaasen have found ways to make the truth “dazzle gradually”—and to turn it into art.