400 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 22 to January 26
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Much like Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, Swamplandia! is a Pulitzer Prize finalist from the early 2010s that stakes much of its critical reputation on the artful use of fantasy fiction elements, which ultimately prove to be mundane events filtered through the traumas and griefs of its viewpoint characters. Oh, and both were set in remote corners of the United States. Clearly this was something of a vibe at the time. (“It’s weird that it happened twice,” etc.) Both books would appear to be literary fantasies if you rooted your expectations in the cover blurb copy. Both prove to be contemporary realism long before the end.
In my review of The Snow Child, I went on a tear about how the literary establishment denigrates fantasy fiction, all while simultaneously scavenging through its storytelling vocabulary for the immaculate vibes. Go read that rant if you like. Today, I’m less bothered by it than I had been five years ago.
It helps that Swamplandia! largely lives up to its hype. It is luminous and strange, buoyed like an alligator between worlds, between sun and silt, between death and starlight, between its eponymous island theme park and the outside world the Bigtree children must confront for the first time. Russell’s descriptions are elastic and unexpected figures of beauty. Surprising metaphors add pop throughout the novel. The gravity of inevitability haunts its heart. If any “mundane” novel makes full use of the possibilities of fantasy, it’s this one.
As a white trash child raised in isolation myself, I related intensely to the Bigtree children. Ava’s perspective perfectly captured the magical thinking of being thirteen, the tensile eagerness of self-delusion. Her attempts to gain early entry to the world of competitive gator wrestling were reminiscent of my own naive confidence in my teenage authorship. At one point Ava narrates: “I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none.” Which, same. Meanwhile, Kiwi’s rough introduction to mainland capitalism and social mores was instantly recognizable to someone who went from living in a car to working at a convenience store at 18. I identified with his anthropological notebook most of all.
(Unrelated to anything else, Kiwi’s chapters made me realize that the writers of Jurassic World could have given us a trilogy of dinosaur horror from the perspective of stoned teens working below minimum wage summer jobs at the park, and now I’m disappointed we never got that.)
Russell does the typical “first novel from an acclaimed short story author” thing: interweaving the Bigtree family’s tale with self-contained interludes, such as the brief emancipation and early death of Louis Thanksgiving (or, for that matter, the chapters from Kiwi's perspective). It works beautifully, though at times it tested my attention span.
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