Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

Vintage Contemporaries, 2011

ISBN: 978-0307276681

400 p.p.

“The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it,” our precocious thirteen-year-old narrator Ava tells us, “When I was a kid, I couldn’t see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!’s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you’re short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.”

Charting the decline of a doomed dynasty, Russell’s novel reads like a sprawling Greek tragedy set in the modern day Everglades with chance and market forces in the place of hamartia. Ava’s two word synopsis tells half the story: Swamplandia! is about the fall of a family but also the enduring love and strength that kept it together.

The family in question is the quirky Bigtree clan, proud owners of the eponymous Swamplandia!, an alligator themed amusement park. Living on an isolated hundred acre island off the coast of southwest Florida, the Bigtrees lead an insular life that revolves around their family business. Chief Bigtree heads the operation with his wife Hilola and their three children: spirited Ava, dreamy Osceola, and bookish Kiwi. Billed as “the Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café in the area,” Swamplandia! boasts 98 alligators, a reptile walk, alligator wrestling, and their headline act: Hilola Bigtree’s moonlit gator dive.

The reader is bewitched from the start as Russell opens with a startlingly vivid account of Hilola’s famous dive. Illuminated by a solitary spotlight operated by the Chief, Hilola dives in with the expert precision her survival relies on. As the Chief explained to Ava, the draw of Swamplandia!’s shows lies in the very real and imminent danger they face when swimming with or wrestling their fiercely unpredictable gators. The trick to maximizing the show’s allure was “peacocking weakness.” “Weakness was the feather with which you tickled your tourists,” he explained, “it was your weakness that pinned the tourists to their seats.” The tourists had to see “the puny size of you versus your alligator” to remember “that you could lose.”

What Hilola Bigtree lost to was not an alligator but cancer. Her death marks the beginning of the end for Swamplandia! though Ava did not realize it at the time: “I didn’t realize that one tragedy could beget another—and another—bright eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.”

After the Bigtrees lose their headline act, tourists dwindle, then disappear. The advent of the inferno-themed World of Darkness exacerbates the situation, drawing hordes of tourists with boiling hot colas, bloodred swimming pools, and the Leviathan, a stadium sized whale ride that swallows up visitors in a simulation of digestion. With highway access and a hipper sensibility, Swamplandia!’s aptly named mainland rival gains traction as swiftly as Swamplandia! loses it.

Each member of the Bigtree family has a different response to Hilola’s death and the park’s decline. The Chief ignores his family’s growing debt, Kiwi defects to the World of Darkness where he attempts to alleviate their debt on his minimum wage savings, Ossie becomes fascinated with the occult, and Ava cares for a newborn red alligator, hopeful that it can help her revive Swamplandia!

As each Bigtree grieves and plans for the future in his or her own way, the clan grows apart. With Kiwi working at the World of Darkness and the Chief conducting a lengthy “business trip” on the mainland, Ava and Ossie are soon the only ones left on their island home. Once inseparable from her sister, Ossie begins to withdraw from Ava as she grows increasingly obsessed with contacting ghosts through her Ouija board and worn out copy of The Spiritist’s Telegraph. Ossie begins to date the deceased and falls for a mysterious character known as the Dredgeman.

Swamplandia! reaches fever pitch when Ossie runs away to elope with the Dredgeman. Here the narrative takes on a magical tone as Ava embarks on a search mission with the equally enigmatic Bird Man, who promises to take her to the Underworld to find Ossie. The result is haunting, bittersweet, and all too realistic.

Russell roots the wild twists and turns of her narrative in dazzling prose. Endlessly versatile, she flashes from hilarity to heartbreak and every nuanced mood in between with the swiftness and precision of a gator’s razor-sharp jaws. Preceding the gut-wrenching announcement of Hilola’s illness and death—“And then our mom got sick, sicker than a person should ever be allowed to get"—by just two paragraphs, is a laugh out loud description of Swamplandia!’s lone bear Judy Garland:

Judy Garland’s fur looked like a scorched rug—my brother said she had ursine alopecia. She could do a trick, sort of: the Chief had trained her to nod along to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Everybody, without exception, hated this trick. Her Oz-nods terrified small children and shocked their parents. “Somebody help! This bear is having a seizure!” the park guests would cry—the bear had bad rhythm—but we had to keep her, said the Chief. The bear was family.

The skill with which Russell writes from an adolescent perspective is particularly impressive. She navigates the tension between the magical, technicolor perception of childhood and a fledgling adult realism expertly, creating a richly layered narrative through the voices of Ava and Kiwi.

From the magical realism she conjures out of Florida’s backwoods swamps, to her lovably idiosyncratic characters, Russell’s Swamplandia! is a literary and human triumph. Behind her beguiling prose is a kaleidoscopic medley—a celebration of love and survival, a bittersweet bildungsroman, and a gothic tragedy all rolled into one enchanting tale.

***

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and on The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 List and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2009, she received the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Berlin fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Danks Award. Three of her short stories from her collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves have been selected for the Best American Short Stories volumes. Swamplandia! is her first novel and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is currently writer-in-residence at Bryn Mawr.