Swamplandia! (Karen Russell)

Swamplandia!
Karen Russell
Knopf
Fiction, YA? General Fiction
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: In the swampy Ten Thousand Islands region of Florida, no tourist's journey is complete without a visit to Swamplandia! Three generations of Bigtree "Indians" (as authentically Native American as their Ohio-born progenitor) have lived and worked on their own private island, wrestling alligators and driving tram tours and hawking merchandise to gawking mainlanders. Every night, the world-famous female gator wrestler Hilola Bigtree performs her trademark swim through a tank swarming with nearly a hundred monstrous reptiles.  It's a death-defying spectacle - fun for the whole family!
Ava Bigtree, youngest daughter and most promising prodigy of the alligator wrestling line, grew up in this world apart from the World, her family's swampy island kingdom. Like the alligators themselves, Swamplandia! seemed immune to the passage of time... but time catches up to everyone, and everything. After Hilola lost a brief and bitter fight with cancer, Ava watches her family and her island fall apart. When a competing park, the Hell-themed World of Darkness, opens up on the mainland, the lifeline of tourists dries up. Her father, "Chief" Bigtree, comes up with one impractical plan after another to save Swamplandia! Her sister Osceola buries herself in occult attempts to conjure up spirits. Kiwi, her booksmart brother, abandons the island for the mainland in his own efforts to save the family business. Meanwhile, Ava throws herself into her wrestling practice, determined to replace her mother. All the while, the greatest threat to the Bigtrees gnaws at them from within, the jaws of grief - and not even a third-generation alligator wrestler like Ava knows how to defeat that terrible monster.

REVIEW: Some books you stay up late reading because you cannot wait to see how they end. Other books you stay up late reading because the thought of ever having to pick them up again is even more dreadful than the words printed on the pages.
Swamplandia! falls into the latter category.
Ava's story reads like a trip through the swamps, overgrown with tangles of colorful detail and murky metaphors, with only the barest hint of clear water ahead at any given time. While Russell weaves a poetic and no doubt accurate description of the Florida swamplands and a bygone world lingering long past its own extinction, she does so at the expense of a compelling storyline. By my estimation, she averages about ten pages of plot progress per hundred pages of text. For all that the book stars an alligator-wrestling dynasty whose star character hopes to use her own skills to save the family's alligator wrestling show, less than a page - at most - out of the entire book actively involves anyone actually wrestling an alligator. Subplots about Osceola's increasing obsession with her posthumous "boyfriends" and Kiwi's educational journey through the bowels of employment at the World of Darkness, not unlike Ava's main tale and the fate of Swamplandia! itself, end with resounding whimpers. Some of Russell's ideas glimmered brightly through the greater murk, but in the end the murk won out.
There is a school of thought, among many readers, that a book need not be interesting to be good. If the author uses complex turns of phrase to build a story full of resounding metaphors, if they pepper the prose with literary references, if they do nothing else for pages on end but delve into the dreary depths of history in order to reflect more fully upon the now, that alone, such people would sniff as they squint over their bifocals in their dimly-lit reading chairs, elevates a story into the realms of proper Literature. They would happily spend months - nay, years - of their lives communing with their fellow high-brow readers, dissecting the minutae of Swamplandia! and exposing the most obscure of wonders before their erudite eyes. I, on the other hand, whose simple little mind merely asks that a story interest and entertain me on some level, can only walk away disappointed that a book starring alligator wrestlers managed to bore me nearly to tears.