| Swamplandia! | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Karen Russell |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Bildungsroman, Magic realism |
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Publication date | 1 February 2011 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 336 pp (First edition, hardcover) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0307263991 |
| LC Classification | PS3618.U755 S93 2011 |
Swamplandia! is a 2011 novel by Karen Russell. Set in the Ten Thousand Islands, off the southwest coast of Florida, it is the story of the Bigtree family of alligator wrestlers. Swamplandia! is Russell's first novel. The book originated as a short story, titled "Ava Wrestles the Alligator", published in the Summer 2006 issue of the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, when Russell was 24 years old.[1]
In October 2011, HBO announced that it was producing a half-hour television series based on Swamplandia! with Scott Rudin serving as executive producer.[2]
Contents |
The novel opens with the Bigtree family suffering tragedy and finding their way of life under threat. The family patriarch, Sawtooth Bigtree, has recently been confined to a floating nursing home with dementia and his daughter-in-law, Hilola Bigtree, has died of cancer, leaving behind a husband and three teenage children. Hilola, a champion alligator wrestler, was Swamplandia's star attraction. Meanwhile, a brand new amusement park, The World of Darkness, has opened nearby on the Florida mainland. The remaining Bigtrees struggle to cope with the changing situation. In light of plummeting attendance and mounting debts, The Chief, Hilola's husband, unveils a plan, which he calls "Carnival Darwinism", for improvements to Swamplandia such as the addition of saltwater crocodiles, but his son Kiwi is skeptical and suggests selling the park altogether. Kiwi and his siblings have been raised on Swamplandia, largely in isolation from the mainland. They have been homeschooled and educated largely through family legends, educational materials sent from a Florida state agency and books found on a derelict "library boat". Having grown up on Swamplandia himself, the Chief is adamantly opposed to abandoning his family's unique heritage and lifestyle.
The situation on Swamplandia continues to deteriorate. Hilola and The Chief's middle child, Osceola, becomes obsessed with ghosts and with occult knowledge she's gleaned from an old book, The Spiritist's Handbook. Osceola begins to hold seances with her younger sister Ava and to communicate secretly with ghosts via a Ouija board. Osceola sometimes disappears at night and it appears to her sister that she might be possessed by spirits.
Meanwhile, Kiwi continues to clash with his father, and he eventually decides to leave the island in an attempt to save Swamplandia on his own. He finds minimum-wage employment as a janitor at The World of Darkness, but his highfalutin language and his stated desires to attend Harvard don't endear him to his coworkers, who scrawl obscenities on his locker and call him Margaret Mead after finding a copy of Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa in his possession. Kiwi eventually befriends his coworker Vijay, who helps him learn to adopt some of the normal teenage vernacular and mannerisms. Kiwi begins to attend night school and is promoted to lifeguard. When he rescues a teenage girl who appears to be drowning in the pool, Kiwi becomes a local hero and, as a result, The World of Darkness sends him to train as an airplane pilot. Kiwi's job will be to fly guests of The World of Darkness on tours of the Everglades and its ecological destruction.
With no new tourists arriving at Swamplandia, The Chief decides to shut the park down and to take a business trip of unspecified purpose and duration to the mainland, leaving Ava and Osceola alone on the island. One day, while clearing melaleuca plants - an invasive species that threatens native vegetation - on a remote part of the island, Ava and Osceola discover a decaying dredge boat offshore. The girls recover some artifacts and Osceola attempts to communicate with the dead crew using her Ouija board.
Osceola eventually reveals what she has learned about the boat to Ava: In the 1930s a young man named Louis Thanksgiving ran away from the abuse of his adoptive family on a farm in the midwest. Louis found his way to the Everglades, where he found work with the Civilian Conservation Corps, dredging the swamp for the purpose of flood control. Despite the difficulty of the work and the primitive conditions in the Everglades, Louis finds that he enjoys his newfound sense of independence. When his assignment with the Conservation Corps ends, Louis signs up to work on a commercial dredging boat for local land developers, but an explosion in the boat's boiler kills him and the rest of the crew. Osceola confesses that she is in love with Louis' ghost and, when Osceola and the dredge disappear, Ava fears that she has run off with him.
Now alone on Swamplandia, Ava meets the Bird Man, a man of indeterminate age who lives in the swamp and makes a living by traveling between local properties and driving off bothersome birds. Ava hires the Bird Man to take her in his pole boat to find her sister. At first, Ava believes that the Bird Man has a mystic power to lead her into the underworld, and at his direction, she even lies to a park ranger, telling him that the Bird Man is her cousin and they are on a fishing trip. Ava and the Bird Man travel deeper into the remote wilderness, resting in a hut built by park rangers and an abandoned group of houses on stilts. Eventually, Ava becomes convinced that the Bird Man has no special powers and that he is taking advantage of her. When they encounter a group of drunken fishermen, Ava screams to get their attention, and the Bird Man silences her. Later, the Bird Man rapes the thirteen-year-old Ava. Ava flees the Bird Man but finds herself lost in the dense sawgrass marshes, without food or water and with no one but the Bird Man looking for her.
Kiwi, meanwhile, discovers that his fiercely-independent father has been working secretly at a casino, possibly for many years. Kiwi continues his pilot training and, on his first flight, he notices a seemingly stranded woman in the remote swamp. The woman turns out to be his sister Osceola, wearing the remains of their mother's wedding dress. Osceola explains that she did elope with the ghost of Louis Thanksgiving, and that Louis directed her to attach an outboard motor to the derelict dredge and pilot it deep into the swamp, but that Louis left her at the altar. Ava is being chased by the Bird Man. She enters an alligator's cave to escape him. The alligator attacks Ava, but she uses the wrestling skills she learned from her mother to defeat the creature. Leaving the alligator's lair, Ava notices some men in the distance. They are park rangers who have been looking for her - the drunken fishermen heard her screaming and alerted the authorities. Ava, Osceola and Kiwi are reunited with their father. As the family plans for the future, they realize that they will have to abandon Swamplandia and move to the mainland, where Ava and Osceola will attend high school.
Thirteen year-old Ava, the youngest Bigtree child, is the narrator of much of the novel (the sections describing Kiwi's journey are told in the third person).
At seventeen, Kiwi is the oldest Bigtree child. He is studious and academically gifted, but his isolated and self-guided education has left him unprepared for mainland life. He uses big words, which he frequently mispronounces, and, at least initially, he struggles to relate to the other teenagers he encounters on the mainland.
Writing in The New York Times, novelist Emma Donoghue praised Swamplandia!, stating: "Vividly worded, exuberant in characterization, the novel is a wild ride: Russell has style in spades." Donoghue continued: "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."[1] The Times named Swamplandia! one of the ten best books of 2011.[3] The book was also named to the longlist for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, an annual book award in the United Kingdom for female writers.[4]