Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

Swamplandia!’s premise alone is enough to warrant writer Karen Russell attention: a pseudo-Native American family lives in and runs an alligator wrestling farm in theEverglades islands in the mangrove swamps of southernFlorida. They are the Bigtree family – Chief, the father and the three children Kiwi, Osceola and Ava help run Swamplandia! where their mother Hilola, is the star attraction and main alligator wrestler. The park is advertised as having ‘Alligators! Starry Nights! It’s like Van Gogh meets Rambo!’ with ‘Live chicken Thrusdays!’ where the family dangle chickens over the alligator pit for the thrill, horror and entertainment of their mainland tourist visitors. Hilola’s greatest feat is diving head first into a seething pit of alligators to emerge unscathed every time.

Russell switches between a first person narrative told from the youngest of the Bigtree children Ava’s perspective and a third person narrative about the eldest child Kiwi’s life on the mainland. The narrative begins with the end of the park’s run: ‘if you’re short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.’ Hilola dies suddenly from ovarian cancer, leaving both her family and the park completely bereft. The family flails without their keel and the park ceases to be attractive without its star. A large theme park called The World of Darkness opens and steals all of Swamplandia!’s potential customers by offering a day trip into hell, with everything from a giant mouth to swallow visitors, to blood red swimming pools and escalator tours of the rings of hell. The Chief insists he can save the park from going under but vanishes to raise funds, Kiwi finally leaves home to try and save the day but ends up a minimum wage worker at the World of Darkness and Osceola begins to spend a frightening amount of time romancing ghosts in the swamp via a homemade Ouija board. In all this the awkward 13 year old Ava tries to find a place for herself, trying to believe in her family in the only way she knows how.

Swamplandia!’s dual narrative’s are both believable: Kiwi’s inability to fit into mainland culture is both sweet and desperate – his side of the story is a deft bildungsroman that is both clever and funny. But it is Ava’s awkward young voice that is the true voice of Swamplandia!, with half the narrative being about her search for Osceola who has run off to ‘marry’ her ghost boyfriend. A stranger arrives, calling himself The Bird Man, promising to help Ava find her sister. Russell’s treatment of this possibly- malevolent character as seen from a desperate 13 year old’s point of view is just incredibly artful – The Bird Man is that monster in Ava’s closet whom she only ever sees from the corner of her eye. While Swamplandia! may not be classic southern gothic, there are some genuinely frightening, grotesque moments in Ava’s narrative, sudden realizations that she has made mistakes that may cost her dearly: ‘Somebody was grinning at me. I could hear the wind fluttering his empty sleeves.’

Swamplandia! does tend to lag a little, but Russell more than makes up for this in the novel’s dénouement, one so fast it almost falls over its own feet. In that it is like Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, the book Russell has named as Swamplandia!’s ‘proto model’, but Russell’s narrative relies on less of the ‘carny’ grotesque than Dunn’s fantastic story did. Swamplandia! is more contemporary in its treatment of relationships and family. Hilola Bigtree’s loss resonates throughout the novel – each character’s sole motive is to eliminate the emptiness left at Hilola’s early death: ‘mothers burn inside the risen suns of their children’ in Swamplandia! The sense of family is strong and the sense of missing family is stronger. Once reunited, Ava says of her sister, ‘…until we are old ladies … I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.’