‘Scarface,’ Lolita and La Carreta: Cuban-American writer’s book is the Miami ‘Moby-Dick’

To say Jennine Capó Crucet’s new novel is a Miami book is an understatement. It’s like suggesting drivers behave erratically on I-95 or that there’s nowhere to park in Brickell. That the rib rolls are good at Flanigan’s or that the wait is a bit long at Apocalypse BBQ in Kendall. That croquetas are popular, and yes, it rains a bit on summer afternoons.

Because “Say Hello to My Little Friend” (Simon & Schuster) isn’t just a Miami book. It’s the Miami book, a blistering, hilarious, tragic novel that is simultaneously absurd and painfully real, an inspired mash-up of “Scarface” and “Moby-Dick.” Crucet pokes fun at notions of authenticity and high versus low art and celebrates the idiosyncrasies of Miami even as she casts an ominous eye to the future and hones in on the obvious: The water is rising as fast as the rent, and this particular way of life in this particular city is not going to last forever.

Crucet, who grew up in a Cuban-American family in Hialeah, will kick off her book tour on publication day, March 5, at Books & Books in Coral Gables. Yes, that date is 3-05, and of course it was chosen deliberately: This is, as we mentioned, the most Miami of books.

Crucet understands that the cultural touchstones in “Say Hello to My Little Friend” will not be familiar to readers outside Miami. Most won’t know about the spray-painted hats from the youth fair, why the Bird Road La Carreta is the best La Carreta or why a tapas bar might be tucked away inside a gas station.

But adding these elements to the story builds a more complete portrait of a city too many people get wrong, she says.

“I can tell you I radically centered a Miami resident as the reader of this book, and if that comes at a cost for readers who aren’t familiar with the city, that’s fine,” Crucet says from her home in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she moved during the pandemic. “That might be a controversial opinion. But we have so many books about New York and New York City, and there are all these great details in them. . . . In a time where we have an entire world of information at our fingertips, it’s fine for someone if they’re lost to pause or if they’re curious to go look something up.”

The novel follows the quest of Cuban-born Izzy (as in “Call me Ismael”) Reyes, a failed Pitbull impersonator who decides to model himself into a latter-day Tony Montana. After all, they both came to Miami on a boat, although Izzy is unclear on the details of his own journey, because he was just a kid. He left Cuba with his mother; she died; he grew up with his aunt. With lamentable lack of skill at anything besides posing for photos at the Dolphin Mall, Izzy sets out to find a sidekick and is drawn to an unexpected ally: Lolita, the Miami Seaquarium’s captive orca.

Trapped and swimming in circles in a tiny tank since 1970, Lolita knows many things about Miami, including the fact that the water is rising and the city is as doomed as she is. Water, of course, is the other main character in the book, swirling and surging, ready to change the face of Miami and the lives of its residents who never plan to leave.

Also author of the novel “Make Your Home Among Strangers,” the story collection “How to Leave Hialeah” and the essay collection “My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education,” Crucet had been working on a version of “Say Hello to My Little Friend” since 2013. She began writing it as a response to publishers who indicated her idea of a Cuban-American novel was not what they had in mind.

“I remember being like, ‘Oh, they want ‘Scarface,’ so I started writing from a place of spite,” she says.

But during 2020, stuck at home and away from her teaching job at the University of Nebraska, Crucet’s mind drifted to Lolita. All Miami kids know Lolita, who died in 2023, and all Miami adults understand how crushing her existence must have been. And thus the orca swam her way into Crucet’s story, reshaping the book and giving it a fresh new perspective.

“It was a very small glimpse into the kind of existence that Lolita might have been having,” Crucet says now of those claustrophobic pandemic days. “I don’t claim to know what she went through in that tank, but there was a sense of: how do you keep yourself from going crazy?”

Crucet built her novel using the structure of “Moby-Dick,” which is why you’ll find chapter titles taken straight from Herman Melville’s American classic (as well as Pitbull lyrics). There’s even a chapter entitled “Birds of Miami-Dade County,” which mimics Melville’s outpouring of whale facts, many of which were debunked over time. In Crucet’s case, she’s writing about local birds, including the seagull, the rooster and Sebastian the Ibis, mascot for the University of Miami.

You don’t have to know “Moby-Dick” to understand “Say Hello to My Little Friend,” but the influence is clear, especially in Crucet’s own motives for writing the book.

“Melville is trying to cram in everything he knows about whales and the whaling industry, knowing that it’s dying and knowing the book will serve as an archive, even though there’s a lot he got wrong,” she says. “I imagined this book as an archive, a certain version of Miami that will cease to exist in my lifetime. There’s just no way given what’s going on with the water and the climate it’s going to survive in the state that it’s in. I felt like anything I’ve ever wanted to put into a book about Miami had to go into this book.”

Crucet has left the world of academia and is working on a screenplay for “Say Hello to My Little Friend” for AMC. She’s fiercely protective of her vision of Miami in the novel, insisting she had to be the one to adapt it (she also insisted on a Cuban-American, Miami-raised narrator, Krizia Bajos, to read the audiobook, dreading a voice that would veer into caricature or insulting cartoonishness like Al Pacino’s in “Scarface”).

She has no plans to move back to Miami, she says. She likes the relative calm of Greensboro, is happily remarried (to a Cuban-American from New Hampshire). Her plan was that writing “Say Hello to My Little Friend” — what she calls her “big fat Cuban novel” — would cleanse her, would “empty the well” of her obsession with her hometown.

Much like Izzy’s quest, her plan did not quite work out. There could be another Miami book in the future.

“Turns out my imagination is in Miami, so when you empty the well, it fills up with more water,” she says, laughing. “Any time I go anywhere here, people in Greensboro can tell by the way I talk I’m not from here. When they ask ‘Where are you from?’ I still say Miami. . . . I feel very lucky to have grown up in Miami. It makes every other place feel temporary. This novel is me starting to reckon with the fact my home is not always going to be there.”

If you go

Who: Jennine Capo Crucet and “Say Hello to My Little Friend”

When: 7 p.m. March 5

Where: Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables

More information: www.booksandbooks.com