The Beginning of the End can feel a
lot like the middle when you are living in it. 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. – from Swamplandia!, page 7 -
It has been a year since Hilola Bigtree died from ovarian cancer
leaving behind her three children – Ava, Osceola (“Ossie”), and Kiwi –
and “The Chief,” her husband. Swamplandia!, with their mother at its
center, is the family business and the only life the Bigtree children
have ever known. Wrestling alligators, selling “museum” trinkets, and
entertaining the tourists who arrive on the ferry is what they have
always done. But, now things have changed. Their mother’s loss has not
only left them achingly alone, but has also left Swamplandia! without a
star act. And there is a new game in town by the name of World of
Darkness, a garish theme park of twisted rides inside a whale’s
digestive tract and pools filled with ruby colored water. Kiwi, nearly
seventeen and longing for a college education, runs away from
Swamplandia! to become an employee at World of Darkness. Chief Bigtree
mysteriously disappears on one of his vague “business trips,” and Ossie,
just turned sixteen, seems lost in a world of ghosts and an old dredge
boat. Ava, age thirteen, is left to her own devices and resolves to save
Swamplandia! and her family before time runs out.
Karen Russell’s Orange Prize nominated debut novel is filled with
quirky characters, rambling plot lines, and gorgeous descriptions of the
Florida swamps. It is also a darkly constructed story about the
individual nature of grief and loss. Each character in
Swamplandia!
is devastated by the loss of Hilola – a woman whose death-defying act
of swimming with the alligators (called “Seths”) opens the novel. It
seems that death is all around this family – from the monstrous Seths,
to the World of Darkness where tourists are called “Lost Souls,” to
Ossie’s flirtation with a dead teenage dredgeman, to Ava’s fantasy of
visiting the Underworld and finding her mother. Each character is
traveling their own path through grief.
Chief Bigtree, the dad, is oddly disconnected from the reality of his
failing business. He seems unaware that his children are falling apart.
His reaction to the loss of his wife can only be called denial. Perhaps
Ava understands this best of all when she observes:
You could become a
fossil in your lifetime, I’d discovered. I’d seen the eerie
correspondence between the living Seths in our Pit and their taxidermied
brothers in our museum. The Chief could achieve an ossified quality,
too, with his headdress skeletally flattened against the sofa back,
drunk and asleep. – from Swamplandia!, page 238 -
Kiwi flees the family, and runs from the memory of his mother whose
image he keeps taped to the inside of his closet door. He leaves behind
the safety of Swamplandia! and enters society where his differences
stand out and he struggles to fit in with his peers. Now seventeen years
old, he is no longer a child whose eyes are closed to the stark reality
of his parents’ world and as he navigates through his grief, he
uncovers family secrets and a rage he hardly knew existed.
Ossie escapes reality by slipping into a world of ghosts and fantasy.
On the cusp of womanhood, she begins a relationship with the ghost of a
dredge boat, slipping out of the house at all hours and spending her
time calling up spirits with the help of a mysterious book.
She set off across the
muck as briskly as a mainland woman who is late for her ferry. Her
footprints filled with groundwater and as I watched a dozen tiny lakes
opened between us. Rain blew in from the east while out west the sun
burned through a V in the trees, bright and gluey-gold as marmalade. – from Swamplandia!, page 127 -
But is is Ava, narrator of much of the novel, who is the saddest in
her grief. She believes her mother has trained her to become the next
amazing alligator wrestler. Ava tries to hold her family together, and
when that fails, she dreams up a way to save Swamplandia! which includes
applying to compete in an alligator wrestling competition, and hand
raising a rare red alligator. Ava’s memories of her mother are clear and
poignant, and cloaked in a child’s reflections.
Our mother, in several
beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries
their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted
easily. It was seventy-thirty odds whether she would remember a
conversation with you. Her moods could do sudden plummets, and she’d
have to “take a rest” in the house, but she’d always emerge from these
spells with a smile for us. Until she got sick, I can’t remember our
mother ever missing a show. – from Swamplandia!, page 43 -
Swamplandia! is, at its heart, about the love that binds a
family together in the face of devastating loss. The strength of the
novel is in its characters who are memorable and feel very real. Russell
also excels at description of the flora and fauna of the Florida
swamps. Where the novel struggles is in the plot which tends to drag
until the latter third of book. Russell alternates between Ava’s first
person narration and Kiwi’s third person point of view – a technique
which tended to break up momentum in the plot. It felt, at times, like
Russell could not decide whose story she really wanted to tell. Ava’s
voice is, overwhelmingly, the strongest and could have carried the novel
alone.
Despite its occasional humor,
Swamplandia! is a dark novel
which resonates with danger. Reality is often fragile and just out of
reach. Not everything is as it seems. It is this haunting quality which
carries the reader through the final pages of the book to an ending that
stretches believability. In fact, the end of the novel did not endear
me to it. Russell quickly wraps up the book and pins a little bow on it,
something I found frustrating after some plot twists which took my
breath away.
I did not love this book, but I found it interesting. Russell is a
talented author whose child characters pulled on my heartstrings, but
whose meandering plot kept me from fulling engaging in their story.
- Quality of Writing:
- Characters:
- Plot:
Overall Rating:
