Swamplandia!

Having read some years ago Karen Russell's debut collection of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, I was looking forward to her first novel, Swampandia! I liked it, but it suffered from some of the same problems her first book did.

The novel expands upon characters created in her short stories, the Bigtrees, who run an alligator farm and theme park in Florida's 10,000 Islands. They are an odd bunch, as typified by the oldest brother, Kiwi: "Well, for starters, my sixteen-year-old sister is crazy, she has aural and visual hallucinations...my youngest sister is an equestrian of Mesozoic lizards...my father wears a headdress...my grandfather bites men now..."

The book begins shortly after the children's mother has died from cancer. She was the drawing card, who several times a day dove into a pool full of alligators (the Bigtrees call them "Seths") and swims safely to shore. The father, called Chief, though he is descended from Germans from Ohio, is determined to keep the park alive, but when a rival park called World of Darkness (it creates a facsimile of Hell for tourists, highlighted by the Leviathan, which enables guests to find out how it is to be swallowed by a whale) opens on the mainland business drops off. The Chief goes to look into buying more exotic species of gator.

While he's gone, Kiwi leaves for the mainland and gets a job at World of Darkness. He's home-schooled but intellectual, and has trouble fitting in: "When he'd used the word 'pulchritude'--a compliment! he insisted--in unwitting reference to another janitor's girlfriend; he later found condoms full of pudding in his work locker and a new phrase to dissect in his Field Notes, GAYASS ASSFUCKER, etched with a cafeteria knife above the locker gills."

The middle child, a delicate girl named Osceola (named after the great Seminole chief), fancies herself in touch with the spirit world. When she runs off to marry a ghost (a young man who died some seventy years earlier on an abandoned dredge), her younger sister, Ava, an accomplished alligator wrestler, goes after her. She's led by a local eccentric, known only as the Bird Man, and takes along a baby Seth who happens to be red. We aren't quite sure what the Bird Man is up to, and there is an element of menace as he poles a boat through the mangrove swamps to find the "underworld."

Where Swamplandia! succeeds is two-fold: first, it marvelously depicts what rural, tidal Florida must be like, and if it isn't, it should be. The 10,000 islands are hardly inhabited, but are now the stomping grounds of two major writers, Russell and Peter Matthiessen. It's wild, largely untameable landscape, though people have tried. Ava, in her quest to find Osceola, goes through some harsh country that is vividly described: "At the dome's edge, two black branches spooned out of the same wide trunk. They looked like mirror images, these branches, thin and papery and perfectly cupped, blue sky shining behind them, and an egret sat on the scooped air like a pearl earring."

Secondly, Russell captures the other-worldliness of the Bigtree clan. The children have lived their whole lives at Swamplandia! Kiwi discovers how rude the mainland is, and Osceola worries about how it will affect she and Ava: "I don't think we'd do very well there, Ava. I don't see how we could ever catch up. What grade would they put us in, at a Loomis school? I mean, are they going to offer a class for Spiritists? Gym class for you? Gym credits for alligator wrestlers?"

Then there's what life on the mainland is represented by. In essence, the World of Darkness, somewhat clumsily, creates a metaphor of Hades on Earth, while things like strip malls and motels combined with bowling alleys are the height of civilization. "Slowly I remembered that I wasn't in the swamp anymore, that we had made it to the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, a place with color TVs and a confectionery of miniature, jewel-colored soaps and shampoo-plus-conditioners and comforters that smelled reassuringly of ordinary vices: old pepperoni pizza, draft beer, Vaseline, cigarettes."

This is very good prose, but at times I felt that Swamplandia! meandered, much like Ava and the Bird Man through the swamp. I could never quite tell what Russell was after, other than spinning a yarn that has elements of folklore and the supernatural. It also has some of the preciousness of her early story collection, without making the emotional impact she may have intended.

I'm certainly fond of enough of Russell's writing to be on the alert for future work. This book is, after all, a first novel, and I sense her next will be even better.