Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

It is intriguing how the Pulitzer Prize in fiction was not awarded this year. I was incredibly intrigued. I followed the story on the Daily Beast and I read all the speculation on how this doesn't mean that the three contenders weren't good enough for the Pulitzer Prize. Well, if if one of them was good enough, why didn't one of them win? I think it was a publicity thing. No prize awarded is much much more interesting than a deserved prize being given. They've got to sell papers, right?


 Anyway, that's how I got suckered into reading Swamplandia! The first chapter made me immediately regret this decision and I held that disdain for three quarters of the book. It was just so damn depressing.

After the feeling of deep depression wears into a slightly bothersome but waning sadness, you realize that those feelings of unease as a child may have been founded and shared  by many forming the new american experience. Swamplandia! captures the quark and texture of offbeat americana. It was refreshing (to some extent) to relive my childhood in this way.

Swamplandia! is about Ava Bigtree, a 13 year old girl following her moms footsteps on becoming a side show act in thier sub par alligator theme park. When her mother dies, the family is torn to pieces. Without the star of the show, the theme park falls in financial ruin. Her brother, Kiwi, runs away to work on a lame rival theme park to raise money to send home. Her older sister, Osceola, dives deeper into a fantasy world where she is dating a ghost. (Here are the spoilers). Her sister casts herself away on a boat to marry one of her ghost friends like a lunatic, and Ava can't stand to be abandoned. She enlists a creepy bird contractor that she affectionately calls "Bird Man" to help her find her sister. He rapes Ava. (end spoilers) Then everything turns out okay.

Ava  is weaves in and out of innocence. Those drastic demarcations of naivity is what make this book a gem. It is hard to quantify what maturity is, what makes one act like adult. When you read those small shifts in Ava's mindset, the cross over hit you like a brick wall. She is at one point trying to save the park, then she is trying to save her sister, then she is just trying to save herself by just a small drink of water. She makes mental trade offs between drinking water and realigning with her rapist. She thinks about whether or not she believes in ghosts, and if it even matters what she thinks. I suppose that is what makes a book a "coming of age" story.

I have a theory about the red alligator. The red alligator was Ava's scheme to save the park. She found it while she was harvesting hatchlings, and kept it as a pet. For some odd reason that she can't even explain to herself, she took it with her when she went with the Bird Man to rescue Osceola. After the raping, Ava decides to run and deflects Bird Man's attention by throwing the red alligator hatchling at him. I think the red alligator represented naive hope.

It is clear how childish Ava is being when you see the hard reality at the end of the book. Osceola was sick, and they gave her drugs for it. They could never save the park, and it wasn't the end of the world.

I can see why this book was nominated for a Pulitzer. The writing is hypnotically textured like a Tom Robbins novel without the randomness, with a weighty nostalgia ala Steinbeck. It just wasn't a page turner. I didn't have the urge to come home every day and open this book like I did with The Hunger Games or even like 50 Shades of Grey.  There is some unquantifiable quality that makes a book a best seller and its not the same quality that makes it a fine piece of fiction.