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323 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2011
Swamplandia! begs George Saunders references. Karen Russell shares Saunders fascination with the peculiar Americana of the tourist trap. The titular attraction here is the island home of the Bigtree Tribe, a family of eratz Indian alligator wrestlers. However, whereas the attractions become characters of Saunders' stories, Russell's characters are themselves the attractions of Swamplandia. Their faces appear on the billboards and promotional material and one of the attractions is a museum devoted to the families history that features baby pictures and wedding dresses. So when Hilola Bigtree succumbs to cancer, the clan not only loses its matriarch, but also its chief attraction.
The narrator of much of the novel is Ava, the youngest of the Bigtree children. Russell does a pretty deft trick with this voice. Ava's narrative hints at magical realism but actually depicts an adolescent's disenchantment with the magical world of childhood and confrontation with the harsh and often terrifying world of the adult. However, once this realization is made, this part of the novel loses much of its force and becomes somewhat monotonous. After a certain point, Russell runs out of things to say but the narrative contineus.
The other portion of the novel is devoted to Ava's brother, Kiwi, who runs away to the mainland in an effort to save the family but finds himself working at a competing amusement park, the Biblically inspired World of Darkness. I found these sections to be ultimately more interesting than Ava's story. However, Russel's narrative structure is somewhat disjointed. Almost the first hundred pages are told from Ava's first person perspective. However, after Kiwi runs away, the chapters alternate between the continued story of Ava and a third-person narrative of Kiwi's struggles on the mainland. The alternating narratives never really coincided in either temporal location or theme and I found this to really disjointed and somewhat clumsy.
Although I was unimpressed by her first novel I still think Karen Russell is a writer to keep an eye on. The novel suggests that Russell is a great short-story writer, and at times this novel really betrays its roots as an expanded short story. Maybe Russell is one of those writers who are never able to transform their ideas into a cohesive narrative for a full-length novel. Maybe I'm a sucker for a writer for my home town, but I still believe that this is Russell's A.M. (the Wilco debut) a derivative and somewhat disappointing debut that shows promises of future greatness. In the end, Swamplandia! exhibits the fact that Russell has a lot of creative ideas and interesting things to say. Unfortunately the combination of these elements creates a disjointed, muddled, and monotonous disappointment.