Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

I had a feeling like I was still moving, still flying up and up toward the surface.  The stars greeted me like a second challenge.  After months of the bad feeling--months of the sensation that I was evaporating, of practicing for wrestling shows we were never going to perform again--I could taste the old Bigtree victory.   Suddenly I remembered: I am an alligator wrestler.

Ava Bigtree lives with her family on an island off of the Florida Everglades where they run a theme park called Swamplandia!  (Exclamation point original.)  It's a strange but pleasant life: her father, Chief Bigtree (not really an Indian) runs the place; her mother is the star alligator wrestler.  Ava herself is training to be an alligator wrestler; her sister Osceola and brother Kiwi are a little more on the conventional side.  But then her mother dies suddenly, and the future of the park is thrown into question.

The Chief leaves suddenly for business on the mainland, leaving his children to fend for themselves in the park.  This starts a chain of adventure for each of the Bigtree kids: Osceola, who dabbles in spiritualism, is convinced she has fallen in love with the ghost of a dredger whose boat they discover floating among the sawgrass.  When she leaves, Ava must find her, searching for a mysterious location marked by piles of shells that may or may not be the literal opening to the underworld.  She's accompanied by the "Bird Man," a kind of professional Pied Piper of buzzards who keeps island dwellers safe from avian molestation.  Kiwi has the most normal storyline: he travels to the mainland to work at the newly opened World of Darkness, a hell-themed park that has sapped Swamplandia!'s business.

There's a kind of connection between the "mouth of hell" Ava and the Birdman are searching for and the theme park version at the World of Darkness, with its dyed-red swimming pools.  The World of Darkness is a Disneyfied version of the real spiritual locus that Ava and Ossie are seeking; is Swamplandia!, too, a Disneyfied version of the real wild Everglades?  Ava feels safe with the Bird Man, but his trustworthiness is not assured, and perhaps he is leading her into a real darkness, with real dangers for which, unlike the alligators, she's not trained.

The best thing about Swamplandia! is how painstaking Russell's sense of the Everglades is.  It's packed to the margins with knowledge and experience of South Florida, from the grass-covered chickees of the Ten Thousand Islands to the invasive meleleuca trees that threaten everything.  The best part of the novel, actually, is the story of the Dredgeman Louis, with whom Ossie has fallen in love: a chilling story of the folly of human engineering on the Everglades in the early 20th century.  Swamplandia! is nothing if not evocative of a very specific place, a place that is unique in the world, and thus deserves evocative accounts.

But it's also incredibly overstuffed.  There's no reason for this book to be 400 pages.  Like a canoe in the sawgrass, it moves at a plodding pace, and I never felt it was able to pick up a worthy momentum.  The parts at the World of Darkness start from a place of tremendous inspiration (a hell-themed park is a clever inversion of capitalist value) but in practice, they're rarely funny.  The humor is too broad, too reliant on that first idea, and the crass machismo of Kiwi's coworkers ("Bro!") is particularly grating.

And what about Ava?  (Spoiler alert time!  And uh, trigger warning!)  She's captivated by the Bird Man in the same way that her sister is captivated by ghosts; even blurting out that she loves him at one point.  His protests that she can't tell anyone about what they are doing--because Child Protective Services might take them away from their absent father--begin to seem awfully suspect, and these suspicions are confirmed when he rapes her.  She's thirteen, and her sections of the book are written in the first person.  It's an awful, horrible thing to read, but I couldn't figure out what made such a horror necessary.  Doesn't it confirm exactly what the Bigtrees' skeptics might say, that a life out on the swamp with a neglectful father encourages disaster?  Isn't it, among other things, an affirmation of the banal, soul-crushing world of the mainland, where at the very least vagrants aren't out here kidnapping and raping children?  I don't know--I just feel like the narrative reward for a rape scene has to be very high, and I'm not sure it's met here.

Swamplandia! can be clever, lush, and fun.  But it wasn't those things frequently enough for me to really enjoy it.  I've heard Russell's stories are much better, and I can see how that might be true--in a more concentrated format, these aspects of her fiction might be more concentrated.