I make a Dante-esque visit to Florida

Swamplandia! ****
by Karen Russell

The Bigtree family lives on a swampy Florida island where they've run an old-school roadside attraction called Swamplandia! for three generations. A lot of what we find in Swamplandia! is fake. The first Bigtree was Ernest Shedrach, an Ohio miner who was suckered into buying the proverbial Florida swampland in the 1930s. Ernest, who later transformed himself into a fake Indian, Sawtooth Bigtree, made a going concern of Swamplandia! The place features cheap beer and ice cream, and a Bigtree museum of fake artifacts whose backstories change frequently at the whim of the Chief, Sawtooth's son. But the alligator wrestling is real, and so is the big nightly attraction in which Hilola Bigtree, matriarch, climbs a diving board and jumps into a pool of 70 gators and swims across without a scratch. Swamplandia! is a strange version of Paradise, but it is full of innocence and lack of worldly knowledge, at least for the three youngest Bigtrees, Chief and Hilola's children.


Here's a description from Ava, the youngest Bigtree and sometime narrator of the novel:

On Live Chicken Thursdays, a very popular and macabre attraction, the [alligators] jumped five feet out of the Pit to snatch the cloud-white hens suspended above them, tied by their talons to a clothesline. The [alligators] drowned and ate these chickens in an underwater cyclone called the Death Roll while tourists snapped photographs. ... I think my family traumatized generations of children and old women. And we girls must have inherited our forebears' immunity to gore, because Ossie and I could eat PB&J sandwiches during a Death Roll, no problemo.

Swamplandia! is not "the lion shall lie down with the lamb" variety of Paradise, but, given what's to come, it's a regular Eden until forces conspire to separate the family, who each take their solitary journeys to Hell, and from whence they end up in what I suppose you could call Purgatory, if you wanted to strain the analogy. In any case, it's clear that Paradise cannot be regained.

These journeys to hell and back take place in real physical landscapes. Brother Kiwi goes to work in a mainland attraction called, somewhat heavy-handedly, the World of Darkness; sister Osceola finds a spiritist manual and begins to hear ghost voices and runs off with a spirit lover wonderfully named Louis Thanksgiving, sister Ava in pursuit with a mysterious bird man. Grandpa Sawtooth is locked in a nursing home for biting a Swamplandia! customer. The Chief is also living in his own hell on the mainland, his whereabouts unknown to the kids.

But the journeys in the book are also interior. The three young Bigtrees are restive teenagers, and what teenager is satisfied with anything, even the relative paradise of Swamplandia!? There's a lot of growing up, but it's not all heart-warming. The hellish landscapes do a wonderful job mirroring the harrowing time that is adolescence. Most of it is scary as, well, hell, and therein lies a good deal of the charm and truth in the book.

Another point in the book's favor is Russell's lush style and imagery. It isn't magical realism, as it seems at first, but rather is so bedecked with symbols that conjure up echoes of primal themes of Western literature in fresh ways that the novel becomes a kind of treatise on notions of good and evil, sin and redemption, grace and the dark night of the soul. The beauty is, you don't have to know any of that to know that "Swamplandia!" is just a hell of a good book.