Swamplandia a Snappy Novel

Swamplandia! (2011)

By Karen Russell

ISBN: 978-o-307-27668-1

Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! is showing up on a lot of “Best Of” lists for 2011 novels and some reviewers have hailed it as their top choice. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it is a very impressive debut novel populated with unforgettable characters. If pressed for a sound bite, mine would something along the lines of: “Hard-luck losers mucking about wetlands trying to avoid being snapped up by a Leviathan named Seth.” Let me explain.

Russell’s story centers on the Bigtree family, an ensemble ensconced on a muddy island in the midst of the Okefenokee Swamp. The Bigtree surname is an invention of patriarch Samuel designed to make his poor white trash brood seem vaguely “Indian” and more exotic for tourists making their way from the mainland to witness the family enterprise: alligator wrestling. Samuel rules over his family and a dreary little theme park, Swamplandia, as the “Chief.” He’s equal parts deluded, bumbling, big-hearted, well intentioned, and clueless. He’s mainly inept and the family’s real center is its star, matriarch Hilola. She was born Jane Owens, but as Hilola she dives into an alligator pit, out swims them, and puts on a show by subduing one of the gators and taping its jaws shut. The Chief runs a family “museum,” hawks junky souvenirs, and mentally prepares his children to enter the family business by feeding them constant stories about the family’s fame on the mainland. The kids dutifully tend to the “seths,” the nickname given to all alligators because Hilola originally wrestled a monster called Seth on a billboard. (As The Chief explains, they kept the name because “advertising is expensive.”) The family’s alleged fame is mostly a load of swamp mud, but seventeen-year-old Kiwi and younger daughters Osceloa, 15, and Ava, 9, mostly believe it until their mom suddenly dies and Swamplandia is left entirely to The Chief’s stewardship. As you might expect, that doesn’t go well.

Swamplandia! begins as a quirky book about lovable losers, but it becomes something murkier and sadder. When Hilola dies, the tourists stop coming, Kiwi bolts for the mainland, and The Chief soon follows–ostensibly to raise money for a new scheme that will win back tourists from a mainland amusement park. We watch as the Bigtrees replace one set of myths with equally implausible ones. Kiwi lands a job at the rival theme park, where he practices using big words and dreams of going to Harvard, though he’s just flunked his GED exam. Nobody knows where The Chief has gone, and the two girls remain on the island. Osceola disappears into Ouija boards, séances, and imagination. When an abandoned 1930s-era dredge floats into Swamplandia’s waters, Osceola announces she is betrothed to the ghost of a young man who died on the boat; one day she too disappears. The guts of the book evokes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness–Ava’s journey into the heart of the swamp in search of her sister. Her guide is a creepy Deliverance-like figure known only as The Birdman.

The Conrad reference works on another level, if one considers that the Bigtrees call alligators “seths.” Set­–rendered Seth by the Greeks–was the Egyptian god of darkness and chaos. He’s the one who killed and disemboweled his brother Osiris and then poked out the eye of Osiris’s son Horus, who in turn castrated Seth. The blind eye, darkness, chaos, the spirit world…. All of these are good metaphors for this novel. Could we even see Sam as emasculated once his Chief illusion is shattered? You tell me when you rediscover him in Swamplandia!

Russell raises big issues in her novel, not the least of which is the question of how families such as the Bigtrees are supposed to cope. Take away their fantasies and what, precisely, do they possess? She creates indelibly memorable characters, makes us feel Ava’s peril and the slither of the swamp, and takes us inside a world where few of us would wish to enter any way other than vicariously. At some point in the journey she’s a little lost herself and the novel’s resolution feels like a deus ex machina worthy of one of Osceola’s séances. But one can forgive such slips in the midst of such fecund storytelling.