I am pretty much in awe of some of the new young writers coming up -- in awe of their mad skills as writers, their emotional intensity, and the extraordinary way they use fairy tale and myth in modern settings. I was already impressed with Karen Russell's terrific short story collection, St Lucy's Home for Girls Who Have Been Raised By Wolves, and I have been waiting ever since I read the short story in that collection about Ava Bigtree, the young alligator wrestler of the Florida swamps, for the novel-length story of her family. And it has been well worth the wait.
Swamplandia! describes the heroic and at times hilarious effort by the Bigtree "Tribe" to maintain their way of life on a small island resort in the Florida Keys that features alligator wrestling by the extraordinary mother Hilola Bigtree, whose daring dives into a pool of alligators thrilled audiences daily. Until Hilola died young of cancer, leaving behind three grieving children and a husband whose entrepreneurial skills falter without his wife in the spotlight. As Swamplandia! and the Bigtree family begins to suffer economically and emotionally from the loss of their headliner, each member of the family struggles to find a way through grief and transformation.
Ava, the youngest at 12 secretly practices the skill of alligator wrestling, hoping to fill her mother's spotlight. But when her older sister begins dating "ghosts" and then elopes with a ghost on a derelict dredge barge, Ava journeys through the backwater marshes with a Charon-like bird man to rescue her sister Ossi from tumbling into hell. Ava's older brother Kiwi flees to the mainland to raise much needed money for Swamplandia! by working for the competition, "World of Darkness," a sort of Dante-esque Disneyland where patrons inner tube down the throat of a monstrous Leviathan into an Inferno digestive system.
Russell's prose is rich, surreal, and evocative -- the natural world is at once gorgeous, abundant with life, and sinister with half seen dangers. Ava nurtures a rare red-scaled alligator and travels through the swamps guided by vultures. Ossi like a willing Persephone lives between the living and the dead, hoping to find her mother among the shades and settling for the love a long ago ghost. On the mainland, Kiwi confronts the ambiguities of urban life, full of new opportunities and near disasters in the mouth of a plaster whale.
It's a gorgeous novel -- and now out in paperback. I also recommend reading this terrific interview with Karen Russell about her work on this novel.
Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition....
