Vintage Contemporaries
2011, 397 pages, paperback, $14.95
Russell’s debut novel, “Swamplandia!,” takes readers on a wild ride through the Florida Everglades. Ava Bigtree, the novel’s 13-year-old heroine, has spent her childhood traipsing around the Bigtree’s gator-wrestling theme park, Swamplandia!
But after the death of Ava’s mother—the unquestioned star of the park’s jaw-dropping alligator performances—the Bigtree way of life is in danger of obsolescence. With no one to perform Hilola Bigtree’s star act—a daring swim across a pool of live alligators—and the encroachment of a sophisticated theme park competitor, the World of Darkness, tourism at the Bigtree gator park comes to an abrupt halt. To make matters even more tangled, Ava’s sister, Ossie, falls in love with a ghost while her big brother, Kiwi, defects to the World of Darkness in an attempt to save the family from financial ruin. Chief Bigtree, Ava’s loveable father, ventures to the mainland to take care of business, leaving Russell’s 13-year-old protagonist to manage the family’s gators and her grief on her own.
Set against the backdrop of the Florida swamplands, “Swamplandia!” is as much about place as it is about family. Similar to her critically acclaimed collection of short stories, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” Karen Russell’s novel is set in an enchanted America. Fecund and haunting, the landscape of the swamp is painted with strokes that resemble the art of a Victorian novelist—description is vivid with precise and lyrical detail. Early in the novel, Russell writes how the “[s]panish moss and pineapple-like bromeliads waved in tall curtains from the bay trees.” She intersperses the family drama with biological impressions like “air plants hung like hairy stars” over “twinkling lakes” and “estuaries, where freshwater and salt water mixed and you could sometimes spot small dolphins.” If Karen Russell accomplishes anything (and I think she accomplishes much), “Swamplandia!” captures a region of the United States largely ignored by contemporary authors.
But the tension of the story rests in the conflict between old and new. Just as the arrival of the World of Darkness threatens the Bigtree way of life, the intrusion of science and progress wreaks destruction on a fragile ecosystem. Ava Bigtree explains that “the dikes and levees that the Army Corps had recommended for flood control had turned the last virgin mahogany stands into dust bowls; in other places, wildfire burned the peat beds down to witchy fingers of lime.” As readers, we wonder if the same fate will befall the Bigtree family—will the intrusion of a multi-million dollar corporation with it glitzy gimmicks destroy a family who celebrates an age-old reptilian wonder? Or will the Bigtrees find ways to adapt, just as the Everglades continue to twist and grow? Either way, I’m glad Karen Russell takes me along for the ride. The only thing I wanted more of in this novel? Gators. With a cover as promising as “Swamplandia’s,” I wanted to see and hear reptiles snapping on every page.
Monet Moutrie, Staff Blogger