Swamplandia!

Review by New York Times Review

In 2006, Zoetrope published a story by a 24-year-old writer, Karen Russell. That story, "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," featured a lusciously strange setting (an alligator theme park in the Everglades) and a tough young heroine with a dead mother and an absent father, as well as a weird problem: how to save her resented-yet-beloved older sister from eloping with a ghost. A few months later, Russell's first story collection, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," with "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" leading a crazy procession of nine other Florida swampland stories, won her wide acclaim, and last year she was chosen one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" top fiction writers. Now her fans can sink their teeth into her first novel, "Swamplandia!," a sort of expansion of and sequel to that alligator story. Vividly worded, exuberant in characterization, the novel is a wild ride: Russell has style in spades. The setting and the sisters (Ava and Osceola, aka Ossie) are the same, but they now benefit from a full back story. It's easier to care about the pleasures and miseries of life in a failing gator park when we know how the father (the self-proclaimed Chief Bigtree) and his family ended up there, and are led to understand what goes into the routine of putting on death-defying shows every day. If Russell's style is a North American take on magical realism, then her commitment to life's nitty-gritties anchors the magic; we are more inclined to suspend disbelief at the moments that verge on the paranormal because she has turned "Swamplandia!" into a credible world. The Bigtrees' story gains resonance, too, when we learn the Everglades' history of governmental mishandling (the seeds of invasive melaleuca trees were sprinkled from airplanes in the 1940s) and environmental disaster; at times the family's stranded island stands in for the nation or even the planet. And the landscape itself is a polymorphous symbol for the ambiguities of adolescence - "tides maniacally revised the coastlines," Ava tells us - as well as for other disasters like the disease that killed her mother: melaleucas swallow 50 acres a day with "a haywire fertility, like a body making cancer." Ava is a highly appealing narrator who has many talents beyond swimming with gators or taping their jaws shut. If protagonists (especially of first novels) typically bewail the mundanity of their small towns, the exotic is normal to Ava. Her first-person narration is not a transcription of a 13-year-old voice, but an evocation, in adult language, of a barely adolescent mind-set. This allows for a dazzling level of linguistic invention. Here Russell as Ava describes the dozen houses on pilings that make up the abandoned outpost of Stiltsville: "dawn light screaming through the doorways that hung on their hinges, the broken windows that birds could fly through, the plank lace, the cheesed metals." The Bird Man, a feather-coated drifter with a knack for getting troublesome birds to move on, takes on full life in the second half of the novel. "Swamp people are this country's last outlaws, kid," he tells Ava. "We have to stick together." But the cup of kindness turns out to be poisoned. Wearing the double face of guide and devil, the Bird Man takes Ava on a long, hellish boat journey in search of her sister. The flashes of quirky humor in "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" have ripened into high comedy in the novel, mostly thanks to a new character, Kiwi, the pragmatic 17-year-old brother to these wild sisters. Kiwi leaves his family a "Valedictory Note" expressing his "insuperable horror at the mismanagement of Swamplandia! and the poverty of our island education." Escaping from Swamplandia! with the hope of paying off its debts, he takes a McJob at the World of Darkness, the rival theme park 40 miles away. The central joke is that his home-schooled erudition has left him as ill equipped for mainland life as some time traveler. "Telling your fellow workers that you were going to Harvard was a request to have your testicles compared to honey-roasted peanuts and your status as a virgin confirmed, your virginity suddenly as radiant and evident to all as a wad of toilet paper that was stuck to your shoe." While Kiwi's manager, Carl Jenks, is a petty tyrant, his co-worker Vijay is a self-assured pothead who takes a benign interest in the new boy's re-education. When Kiwi responds to a question - "Oh, O.K. Right-o" - Vijay cracks "one reddened eye at him" and demands: "Right-o? Are you Sherlock Holmes? Have I taught you nothing?" As Kiwi labors in the overtly Dantesque World of Darkness (where the customers are addressed as Lost Souls), Southern Gothic meets deadpan corporate satire to hilarious effect. His situation is a modern take on that of a miner in a company town; after three 60-hour weeks he finds he somehow owes the corporation $182.57. On his first day as a lifeguard, he is handed a list of the links in "The Drowning Chain": "Lack of Education, Lack of Protection, Lack of Safety Advice, Lack of Supervision, Inability to Cope." It's a reprise of the Bigtrees' childhood, lightly delivered. AT times, the Kiwi (third person) and Ava (first person) sections read like two different books, and while this can be refreshing it does make the novel feel uneven. Readers may wonder why only two of the three siblings are allowed to tell their stories as Ossie remains offstage, missing in the swamp, for much of the novel - especially as her ghost boyfriend, the 17-year-old Depression-era dredgeman Louis Thanksgiving, gets a superb 17-page bildungsroman of his own. The answer may be that Ossie is less a character than an alter ego for Ava: the madwoman in her attic, the other side of puberty, the fallen Eve to her stroppy Lilith. The parents have a much more solid feel, even though the mother, Hilola Bigtree, has died at 36. Ava is Hilola's understudy in the alligator show and the chief mourner: "Every rock on the island, every swaying tree branch or dirty dish in our house was like a word in a sentence that I could read about my mother." All the detritus Hilola has left behind attests to her reality, from her baggy swimsuits to the trophy for an alligator-wrestling contest that, in a moment of gut-knotting disappointment, Ava learns is not quite what it seems. The family's loss is visceral: failing to do the laundry, the girls spray their clothes with an old 1970s perfume of their mother's. And it is Hilola's urgent, protective presence that brings this moving novel to its climax. As for the father, he is pathetic in his grandiose bossiness as much as in his unspoken grief. "Be the Chief again," Ava silently urges him, and he does give it his best shot. The plot of "Swamplandia!" is nothing special - dysfunctional family pull apart, then pull together - but the execution is. This family, wrestling with their desires and demons, will neither succumb nor triumph, but survive in their scarred way, and will lodge in the memories of anyone lucky enough to read "Swamplandia!" If the gothic whimsy of this novel is sometimes too self-conscious, the pleasures it offers are unforced. As the wooden sign at the entrance to the Gator Pit says, "You Watchers in the First Four Rows Guaranteed to Get Wet!" To read an interview with Emma Donoghue, visit nytimes.com/bookreview 'Swamp people are this country's last outlaws, kid,' a sinister drifter says. 'We have to stick together.' Emma Donoghue's latest novel, "Room," was one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2010.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 6, 2011]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Russell's lavishly imagined and spectacularly crafted first novel sprang from a story in her highly praised collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006). Swamplandia! is a shabby tourist attraction deep in the Everglades, owned by the Bigtree clan of alligator wrestlers. When Hilola, their star performer, dies, her husband and children lose their moorings, and Swamplandia! itself is endangered as audiences dwindle. The Chief leaves. Brother Kiwi, 17, sneaks off to work at the World of Darkness, a new mainland amusement park featuring the rings of hell. Otherworldly sister Osceola, 16, vanishes after falling in love with the ghost of a young man who died while working for the ill-fated Dredge and Fill Campaign in the 1930s. It's up to Ava, 13, to find her sister, and her odyssey to the Underworld is mythic, spellbinding, and terrifying. Russell's powers reside in her profound knowledge of the great imperiled swamp, from its alligators and insects, floating orchids and invasive strangler melaleuca trees to the tragic history of its massacred indigenous people and wildlife. Ravishing, elegiac, funny, and brilliantly inquisitive, Russell's archetypal swamp saga tells a mystical yet rooted tale of three innocents who come of age through trials of water, fire, and air.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Few novelists debut with as much hearty recommendation as Russell, a New Yorker 20-under-40 whose cunning first novel germinates a seed planted in her much-loved collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. We return to Swamplandia!, the once-thriving Florida tourist attraction where the Bigtree clan-Ava, Ossie, Kiwi, and the Chief-wrestles alligators. After the death of mother Hilola-the park's star alligator wrestler-Ava, the youngest Bigtree, takes her place in the spotlight while her sister, Ossie, elopes with a ghostly man named Louis Thanksgiving, and brother Kiwi winds up sweeping floors at Swamplandia!'s competition. Worst of all is the disappearance of the Chief, spurring Ava to embark upon a rescue mission that will take her from the Gulf of Mexico to the gates of hell, occasionally assisted by an unlikely extended family that includes the geriatric Grandpa Sawtooth, the Bird Man, and a tiny red alligator with the potential to save the park. Russell's willingness to lend flesh and blood to her fanciful, fantastical creations gives this spry novel a potent punch and announces an enthralling new beginning for a quickly evolving young author. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

The Tamiami Trail, a two-lane road connecting the wealthy city of Naples with bustling, multicultural Miami, cuts through a river of grass known as the Florida Everglades. This wonderfully unique combination of wildwood hammock and cypress slough has been home to the mound-building Calusa, then the Seminoles, and now the quirkiest, most delightful group of all, the fictitious Bigtrees. A once-thriving destination for blue-haired tourists from the Midwest, Swamplandia boasted airboat rides and alligator wrestling until the death of the feature performer, matriarch Hilola Bigtree. The grieving chief fails to recognize that his kids are suffering, too. Osceola, the oldest daughter, communes with the dead. Kiwi, her brother, makes a pact with the devil, the Disney-esque attraction, World of Darkness, and precocious Ava secretly nurtures a rare red alligator, hoping to revive the family business. Like a kinder, gentler Carl Hiaasen, Russell manages to skewer all the Florida bad guys-Big Sugar, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Casino Gaming Commission-while writing a love song to paradise and innocence lost. Verdict This wildly imaginative debut novel, coming on the heels of the short story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, delivers on Russell's status as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. A phantasmagorical tale of teens left on their own to battle their demons, mixed with a brief history of the Sunshine State, Russell's book will appeal to young adults as well as their folks. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/10.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Mere months after their mother dies, the Bigtree family's alligator-wrestling theme park and cafe, Swamplandia!, goes out of business, sending the abandoned siblings on individual perilous journeys away from home in this dazzling, affecting, funny novel. (Feb.) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Chapter One: The Beginning of the End Our mother performed in starlight. Whose innovation this was I never discovered. Probably it was Chief Bigtree's idea, and it was a good one--to blank the follow spot and let a sharp moon cut across the sky, unchaperoned; to kill the microphone; to leave the stage lights' tin eyelids scrolled and give the tourists in the stands a chance to enjoy the darkness of our island; to encourage the whole stadium to gulp air along with Swamplandia!'s star performer, the world-famous alligator wrestler Hilola Bigtree. Four times a week, our mother climbed the ladder above the Gator Pit in a green two-piece bathing suit and stood on the edge of the diving board, breathing. If it was windy, her long hair flew around her face, but the rest of her stayed motionless. Nights in the swamp were dark and star-lepered--our island was thirty-odd miles off the grid of mainland lights--and although your naked eye could easily find the ball of Venus and the sapphire hairs of the Pleiades, our mother's body was just lines, a smudge against the palm trees. Somewhere directly below Hilola Bigtree, dozens of alligators pushed their icicle overbites and the awesome diamonds of their heads through over three hundred thousand gallons of filtered water. The deep end--the black cone where Mom dove--was twenty-seven feet; at its shallowest point, the water tapered to four inches of muck that lapped at coppery sand. A small spoil island rose out of the center of the Pit, a quarter acre of dredged limestone; during the day, thirty gators at a time crawled into a living mountain on the rocks to sun themselves. The stadium that housed the Gator Pit seated 265 tourists. Eight tiered rows ringed the watery pen; a seat near the front put you at eye level with our gators. My older sister, Osceola, and I watched our mother's show from the stands. When Ossie leaned forward, I leaned with her. At the entrance to the Gator Pit, our father--the Chief--had nailed up a crate-board sign: YOU WATCHERS IN THE FIRST FOUR ROWS GUARANTEED TO GET WET! Just below this, our mother had added, in her small, livid lettering: ANY BODY COULD GET HURT. The tourists moved sproingily from buttock to buttock in the stands, slapping at the ubiquitous mosquitoes, unsticking their khaki shorts and their printed department-store skirts from their sweating thighs. They shushed and crushed against and cursed at one another; couples curled their pale legs together like eels, beer spilled, and kids wept. At last, the Chief cued up the music. Trumpets tooted from our big, old-fashioned speakers, and the huge unseeing eye of the follow spot twisted through the palm fronds until it found Hilola. Just like that she ceased to be our mother. Fame settled on her like a film--"Hilola Bigtree, ladies and gentlemen!" my dad shouted into the micro?phone. Her shoulder blades pinched back like wings before she dove. The lake was planked with great gray and black bodies. Hilola Bigtree had to hit the water with perfect precision, making incremental adjustments midair to avoid the gators. The Chief's follow spot cast a light like a rime of ice onto the murk, and Mom swam inside this circle across the entire length of the lake. People screamed and pointed whenever an alligator swam into the spotlight with her, a plump and switching tail cutting suddenly into its margarine wavelengths, the spade of a monster's face jawing up at her side. Our mother swam blissfully on, brushing at the spotlight's perimeter as if she were testing the gate of a floating corral. Like black silk, the water bunched and wrinkled. Her arms rowed hard; you could hear her breaststrokes ripping at the water, her gasps for air. Now and then a pair of coal-red eyes snagged at the white net of the spotlight as the Chief rolled it over the Pit. Three long minutes passed, then four, and at last she gasped mightily and grasped the ladder rails on the eastern side of the stage. We all exhaled with her. Our stage wasn't much, just a simple cypress board on six-foot stilts, suspended over the Gator Pit. She climbed out of the lake. Her trembling arms folded over the dimple of her belly button; she spat water, gave a little wave. The crowd went crazy. When the light found her a second time, Hilola Bigtree--the famous woman from the posters, the "Swamp Centaur"--was gone. Our mother was herself again: smiling, brown-skinned, muscular. A little thicker through the waist and hips than she appeared on those early posters, she liked to joke, since she'd had her three kids. "Mom!" Ossie and I would squeal, racing around the wire fence and over the wet cement that ringed the Gator Pit to get to her before the autograph seekers elbowed us out. "You won!" My family, the Bigtree tribe of the Ten Thousand Islands, once lived on a hundred-acre island off the coast of southwest Florida, on the Gulf side of the Great Swamp. For many years, Swamplandia! was the Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café in the area. We leased an expensive billboard on the interstate, just south of Cape Coral: COME SEE "SETH," FANGSOME SEA SERPENT AND ANCIENT LIZARD OF DEATH!!! We called all our alligators Seth. ("Tradition is as important, kids," Chief Bigtree liked to say, "as promotional materials are expensive.") The billboard featured a ten-foot alligator, one of the Seths, hissing soundlessly. Its jaws gape to reveal the rosebud pink of a queen conch shell; its scales are a wet-looking black. We Bigtrees are kneeling around the primordial monster in reverse order of height: my father, the Chief; my grandfather, Sawtooth; my mother, Hilola; my older brother, Kiwi; my sister, Osceola; and finally, me. We are wearing Indian costumes on loan from our Bigtree Gift Shop: buckskin vests, cloth headbands, great blue heron feathers, great white heron feathers, chubby beads hanging off our foreheads and our hair in braids, gator "fang" necklaces. Although there was not a drop of Seminole or Miccosukee blood in us, the Chief always costumed us in tribal apparel for the photographs he took. He said we were "our own Indians." Our mother had a toast-brown complexion that a tourist could maybe squint and call Indian--and Kiwi, Grandpa Sawtooth, and I could hold our sun. But my sister, Osceola, was born snowy--not a weak chamomile blond but pure frost, with eyes that vibrated somewhere between maroon and violet. Her face was like our mother's face cast forward onto cloudy water. Before we posed for the picture on that billboard, our mother colored her in with drugstore blusher. The Chief made sure she was covered by the shadow of a tree. Kiwi liked to joke that she looked like the doomed sibling you see in those Wild West daguerreotypes, the one who makes you think, Oh God, take the picture quick; that kid is not long for this world. Our park housed ninety-eight captive alligators in the Gator Pit. We also had a Reptile Walk, a two-mile-long boardwalk through the paurotis palms and saw grass that my grandfather and father designed and built. There you could see caimans, gharials, Burmese and Afri- can pythons, every variety of tree frog, a burrow hole of red-bellied ?turtles and lachrymose morning glories, and a rare Cuban crocodile, ?Methuselah--a croc that was such an expert mimic of a log that it had moved only once in my presence, when its white jaw fell open like a suitcase. We had one mammal, Judy Garland, a small, balding Florida brown bear who had been rescued as a cub by my grandparents, back when bears still roamed the pinewoods of the northern swamp. 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 . Our park had an advertising campaign that was on par with the best of the aqua-slide attractions and the miniature golf courses; we had the cheapest beer in a three-county radius; and we had wrestling shows 365 days a year, rain or shine, no federal holidays, no Christian or pagan interruptions. We Bigtrees had our problems, too, of course, like ?anybody--Swamplandia! had been under siege from several enemy forces, natural and corporate, for most of my short lifetime. We islanders worried about the menace of the melaleuca woods--the melaleuca, or paperbark tree, was an exotic invasive species that was draining huge tracts of our swamp to the northeast. And everybody had one eye on the sly encroachment of the suburbs and Big Sugar in the south. But it always seemed to me like my family was winning. We had never been defeated by the Seths. Every Saturday evening (and most weeknights!) of our childhoods, our mom performed the Swimming with the Seths act and she always won. For a thousand shows, we watched our mother sink into black water, rise. For a thousand nights, we watched the green diving board quaking in air, in the bright wake of her. And then our mom got sick, sicker than a person should ever be allowed to get. I was twelve when she got her diagnosis and I was furious. There is no justice and no logic, the cancer doctors cooed around me; I don't remember the exact words they used, but I could not decode a note of hope. One of the nurses brought me chocolate duds from the vending machine that stuck in my throat. These doctors were always stooping to talk to us, or so it seemed to me, like every doctor on her ward was a giant, seven or eight feet tall. Mom fell through the last stages of her cancer at a frightening speed. She no longer resembled our mother. Her head got soft and bald like a baby's head. We had to watch her sink into her own face. One night she dove and she didn't come back. Air cloaked the hole that she left and it didn't once tremble, no bubbles, it seemed she really wasn't going to surface. Hilola Jane Bigtree, world-class alligator wrestler, terrible cook, mother of three, died in a dryland hospital bed in West Davey on an overcast Wednesday, March 10, at 3:12 p.m. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Swamplandia! by Karen Russell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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