If her dazzling short fiction is any indication, wunderkind Karen Russell is Joy Williams’ Gen Y successor, taking up the elder writer’s powers to incarnate mad, inquisitive worlds of animal tenderness and irony. It’s no wonder that Williams praised Russell’s break-out short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, as “exquisitely rambunctious.” The collection tapped a pumping vein of Russell’s inventive, surreal prose, and beautifully showcased the carnie family Russell takes up again in her first novel.
Swamplandia! chronicles the final days of an eponymous gator-wrestling theme park and the island clan that sired it. As the novel opens, youngest daughter Ava, the narrator, looking back at what she calls “the Beginning of the End,” recalls that at first she was “oblivious of the dangers” that she, her brother Kiwi, and her sister Ossie faced. Hadn’t the worst already happened? Senile patriarch Grandpa Sawtooth was installed at Out To Sea, a floating nursing home, and Swamplandia!‘s fate rested with their father, Chief Bigtree, deep in mourning for Hilola, his wife, their mother, the high-diving star of the gator-wrestling show.
Hilola’s death—at the age of 36, from cancer—has complicated the Chief’s untimely inheritance and haunts his efforts to rally their children to a Carnival Darwinism take-down of the World of Darkness, Swamplandia!‘s theme park nemesis. Despite his bravado, the Bigtrees fall swiftly, dressing in gift shop garb and scavenging from the Swamp Café freezer until Kiwi flees the island for the mainland, Ossie falls in love with a ghost, and, finally, the Chief suspends all shows and heads to mainland Loomis County on a shadowy business trip.
All this leaves Ava veritably deserted in the humid, swampy palm groves, a tag-along bridesmaid to Ossie, who plans to elope with courtly, invisible dredgeman Louis Thanksgiving and escape to The Eye of the Needle, an ancient Indian mound of clay, conch, and oysters shells—and, according to Ossie, a door to the Underworld.
It’s a spellbinding story, but one that lacks the aim and conviction of “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” the St. Lucy short story in which the Bigtree family first appears. There, Russell herself clearly believes in the Bigtrees’ quirks, and hence she keeps us believing too, suspended and buoyant in the story’s strange world. She plays along with the characters’ antics and so unearths the queer human story hidden in a swamp prom, cheeky midnight possessions, and a little sister’s undying faithfulness to the elder.
But in the novel’s broadened universe, it’s as if Russell can’t decide whether she’s conjured a theater of haints or an innocents’ reformatory, a penal swamp in which each character meets a bad end for believing in anything. Swamplandia!‘s every enchantment—from a father’s integrity to a ghostly boyfriend to a Bird Man hero who promises to right all wrongs—is inflated and punctured with an awkward, callous cruelty never present in Russell’s first book. Meanwhile, dramatic irony builds up, then bursts, and themes hit the reader in bald punch lines. And the novel climaxes in a deus ex machina moment in which Ava meets an unkind fate that, frankly, makes no sense—even in this rollicking world of spirits and spells.
Russell hasn’t lost her acuity of language. While Swamplandia!‘s plot may fail, its phrases soar. Fed up with Ossie’s spirit-obsession, Ava exclaims, “If I were a ghost I would ride that pointer around her Ouija like a little white Cadillac, giving her so much grief!” Later, when Kiwi contemplates familial reconciliation, he hopes that the Bigtree family might “at least achieve a food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.”
And in several elegiac passages, Ava contemplates the spiritual beyond the ghostly, especially as concerns her mother’s death and passage on to the Underworld or “God,” an impersonal word Ava generally uses as a “spell-breaker”: ” ‘God,’ I’d whisper, feeling sometimes an emptiness and sometimes a spreading warmth. If a word is just a container for feeling,” she goes on, “or a little matchstick that you strike against yourself—a tiny, firely summons—then probably I could have said anything, called any name, who knows?”
Laura Bramon Good is a writer who lives in Washington, D.C., where she works on human trafficking issues for international relief and development organizations.
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