A WRITER'S WIT |
My Book World
Vintage, 2011.
I began, as usual, to annotate my copy of Swamplandia! because that’s what I do when reading a book. However, with Russell’s novel I repeated a habit I had as a child: I got lost in time and turned page after page, absorbed word after glorious word (a few of which I had to look up). Her narrative beckoned me to travel as quickly as she does.
Swamplandia! is an amusement park on an island, which is part of the Florida Everglades. The park features, among other things, alligator wrestling, and the main wrestler is a woman, Hilola Bigtree, who is struck with cancer. Her husband, the Chief, operates the place, and their three children help out. With the death of Hilola Bigtree, which occurs on page eight, her family must cope, but what happens, instead?
Without their star attraction, the business begins to fail. The Chief decamps, and the children aren’t even sure where, on the mainland, he has landed. Teenage Kiwi, the only son, also leaves. He realizes he must send money home to keep the park afloat and takes a job at a competing park called World of Darkness. The elder daughter, Ossie, exits with an entity she believes is a ghost, and for a time, the reader might be fooled into thinking she actually does. Ava, the young narrator of most of the novel (her chapters are the only ones written in first-person), is left to fend for herself, and she does a most unwise thing: trusts a male adult who is not a member of her family, not even someone she knows tangentially, to help her locate her sister. To tell any more is to spoil your read.
I can say, however, that in the same manner in which I envy someone’s great photograph, I wish I’d written a book like this. At first, it fools you into thinking it’s sort of a comic romp, but then these people Russell has created are too smart for that alone. Though home schooled (by way of Florida state curriculum), all three children have great vocabularies, use their common sense to help them out of the trouble that even smart kids can get into. They pay attention (to some things, anyway). They become acquainted with the unjust and tragic history of the Seminole Indians. Russell’s metaphors are apt, growing naturally out of this swampy environment. Here, little Ava compares alligators to her lost sister:
“Even if she’d [Ossie] gotten away from him [her ghost fiancé] the prognostications were grim—alligators with unusual pigmentation can’t camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp. Their skin is spotlit for predators. That’s why you don’t see albino Seths [Ava’s pet name for alligators] in the wild. Once an alligator reaches a size of four feet its only real predator is man” (338).
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
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