I really liked Karen Russell's SWAMPLANDIA! (correct punctuation and all) but I wish I had loved it. I'm looking forward to Russell's next book as well as catching up with her first, a short-story collection entitled ST. LUCY'S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES. I was caught off guard by how much magical realism there was in SWAMPLANDIA!, the story of the decline of a family amusement park in Florida after the death of its star attraction, alligator wrestler Hilola Bigtree. (In fact, we begin with a recollection of her performances struck with the unforgettable opening line, "Our mother performed in starlight.")
Russell is a fair author to take on this mantle, particularly if she will address some of the faults of other magical realist writers (ahem long lines of beautiful available ladies in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE). And in some ways, the narrator she chooses to bear the burden of most of the book, the sheltered yet adventure-seeking Ava Bigtree, is the perfect choice -- still young enough to harbor some illusions, but old enough to be forced to witness some of them being dismantled. Her unique worldview is captivating -- except in the odd moments where it feels like Russell is trying to make it unique, through using metaphors and similes that flower out of control.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good poetic line, and Russell can sling them. (Insert digression here about whether Russell might have been better served as a career poet and my conclusion that, while maybe she leant that way, poets should be able to write novels, because why not. It livens the shelf.) Here's an example of a poetic digression in SWAMPLANDIA! that I loved, about Ava's brother:
"Kiwi and his father could sometimes meet at the intersection of their two angers, like neighbors drawing up to the barbed stars of a fence."
It's a neat simile, it's concrete, and it illustrates a detail about their relationship that you didn't already know. Here's a more elaborate one that I think still works:
"Something about the way [the seaplane] landed, floats first, gave Kiwi the impression of teeth entering the water, the jet floats biting in to the red-dyed water like two bright fangs."
But every so often Russell leans on her metaphors and her ornate command of language and, to my mind, ends up making no sense at all. I feel like my hated eighth grade English teacher pointing this out, but I don't know what to make of a passage like this:
"Moths jumbled tunelessly above our heads, kaleidoscoping in this way that looked like visible music to me -- something that would be immediately audible to an alligator or a raccoon but that we human Bigtrees couldn't hear."
The conflict between tunelessly and music/audible, the needs to clarify "kaleidoscoping" (a verb I don't have a problem with, only I think it's fairly clear as-is) and specify that the humans wouldn't hear it, even though if we follow the path they could see it... see the moths? Do moths even make noise apart from when they brush up against things? It's also puzzling why Ava would pick out this detail of a night sequence (as it happens to come from) and invest it with such particular importance, although there is ample evidence in the rest of the book that she is prone to paying attention to the wrong things.
Reading passages like those I started to understand, when people fault critical darlings like SWAMPLANDIA! for being "too literary" and somehow unapproachable, that this is what they mean. If I had had to close-read that passage I might still be reading the book right now (exaggeration). I would never say everyone has to write like Hemingway or McCarthy, and some of Russell's turns I dearly loved -- like the way her shame for her father, trying to keep Swamplandia from going under, became "like a sword I'd made, glinting and strong." But I have to go with the comment made by Slate's John Dickerson who, exasperated on the Slate Audio Book Club's discussion of the book, finally exclaimed "Everything can't be like everything else!" That is a useful lesson for all of us out there.
Reading passages like those I started to understand, when people fault critical darlings like SWAMPLANDIA! for being "too literary" and somehow unapproachable, that this is what they mean. If I had had to close-read that passage I might still be reading the book right now (exaggeration). I would never say everyone has to write like Hemingway or McCarthy, and some of Russell's turns I dearly loved -- like the way her shame for her father, trying to keep Swamplandia from going under, became "like a sword I'd made, glinting and strong." But I have to go with the comment made by Slate's John Dickerson who, exasperated on the Slate Audio Book Club's discussion of the book, finally exclaimed "Everything can't be like everything else!" That is a useful lesson for all of us out there.
4 comments:
I just finished Swamplandia! And I remember that simile sticking in my craw as well. Thanks for remembering it and pulling it out. She does have nice turns as well. Her descriptions of Kiwi and mainland teenage society are good.
I think my experience of this book may suffer from my previous reading of Carl Hiasson; it is hard not sound a bit scholcky when writing about the florida swap.
That sentence did not work for me, either. Swamplandia! has plenty of gorgeous writing, but the problem with her occasional over-written sentences is that they call the reader's attention away from the story and to the writer, breaking the reveries I repeatedly found myself falling into.
My other criticism of the book is that some things are clearly intended to be symbolic, but, try as I might, I could not figure out what they were intended to symbolize. What, for example, were the red Seths supposed to symbolize? The novel's best parts are fantastic, but I agree with you that it is perhaps too "writerly," if such a thing is possible.
Dickerson's criticism is entirely fair. You can tell that he liked the book, but found it frustrating, and I think that is a pretty common sentiment.
Also, I think that one of the biggest strengths of the Slate Audio Book Clubs is that some of their commentators are not professional literature critics, and they discuss things that are not "too literary." I don't know if a full-time critic would have said something like "everything can't be like everything else," but its a great observation.
Now that's interesting, because I really like that sentence about moths, and it makes me more likely to read the book.
When moths fly, they displace the air with their wings, and that does make a sound, just like a helicopter's blades or an airplane's propeller. Humans just can't hear the sound of moths' wings because our ears aren't sensitive enough. In this passage,the human narrator can see the moths, and thus can imagine the music they might make to other animals sensitive enough to hear the sound, but can't actually hear it: thus the jumbling moths are sadly tuneless to her. The sense of sight is a poor substitute for the sense of sound here, only illustrating to her what she's missing. (So I'm interpreting.)
It's okay if it worked for you, Elizabeth! It just didn't work for me, and there are probably counter-examples that I would like and you wouldn't. The trouble is, that sentence made me stop in my reading and, as Wade says, break the reverie. (Though your explanation makes sense to me.) I would definitely encourage you to give it a chance though, and let me know what you think.
Wade, I forget who on the podcast set John Dickerson up for that exchange, but one of the other writers said something to the effect of, "Better that younger, newer writers go too big and too far with their imaginations, right?" and he was like "No!" A little harsh, but I think fair. Also, you can say things in discussion that would look ridiculous in a written review of a book (I could quote from my own book club discussions but for the privacy of those involved, I won't).
8, I have to admit to a blind spot regarding Carl Hiassen, but I recently read a very non-schlocky novel set partly in the Florida swamp called STILTSVILLE that you might like more. It's of much smaller scope than this book and more conventional tone, but beautiful in its own way and doesn't suffer from some of the excesses here.
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