Myths, like narratives, rule our lives. From the kindness of Santa Clause to the immaculate sacrifice of Christ, from the reassuring order of justice to the pacifying power of the vote, we are raised on potent ideas to which we bind ourselves in hopes of not only smoothing life's passage, but providing ourselves with a common cultural framework that allows us all to be part of a greater, grander whole. Myths permit us to tell stories about ourselves that soften our edges and promote our virtues, closeting the harshness of absolute truth. But given that myths are, at root, lies, useful but ultimately unavoidable fictions, they will eventually fall apart, tattering under the scrutiny of our maturing eyes and breaking under the stresses applied to them by a changing world. When the myths are dispelled, what will we be left with? Can we handle the truths so cruelly revealed to us? Or must we build new myths to replace the old as a means of cushioning ourselves from that which we dare not regard? Ms. Russell cogitates in her intriguing but flawed novel.
Once a bustling amusement park, home to the best alligator wrestler in Florida, Swamplandia has fallen on hard times. Its star attraction, Hilola Bigtree, has succumbed to cancer, a tragic circumstance that has, in one stroke, deprived Swamplandia of its remaining shining light while unmooring the three teenaged, Bigtree children from the quiet, eccentric lives they had been accustomed to. As the locals throw Swamplandia off for the World of Darkness, a new and tacky park on the Florida mainland, the Bigtree clan struggles to adjust to this new and unexpected reality. While the Chief, their father, vanishes into the mainland to sort out the park's abysmal finances, Kiwi, his only son, takes on a job as a janitor at their hellish rival, sending back all the funds he can spare in hopes of keeping his home afloat.
Meanwhile, on their island home, Ava Bigtree watches her sister slowly descend into madness, searching for understanding amidst the ghosts of Swamplandia's past. This journey will compel Ava to follow her into the swamps that surround their home, driven to save her sister from the underworld she's so eager to fall into.
A surreal novel that breezily transitions between reality and myth, casinos and spirit realms, Swamplandia! is a work of painful nostalgia, a recollection of both the innocence of childhood and the brutality of growing up. It chronicles the discomforting expansion of the world as we age, how simplicity must needs give way to complexity, how morality abandons the comfortable polarity of white and black and enters into a nuanced gray that must be experienced before it can be understood. It acknowledges that such experiences are scarring, but that there is no other way but through. For to reject the harshness of reality is to reject sanity. It is to cut oneself loose from the bondage we all submit to when we grow up and agree to be shackled by civilization.
As much as Swamplandia! tries to dance between myth and reality, as much as it labors to tease us with the seductions of adolescent and familial dislocation, it is ultimately flawed work. Its ventures into spiritualism are as unconvincing as its plot is predictable. The tragedies that befall its characters are, at times, so obvious that the reader is left wading through dozens of pages in order to reach the inevitable. Such threadbare puppeteering on behalf of the author prevents the work from ever reaching any kind of emotional awakening. Every action, every episode, is one step removed from us, a reality that precludes the reader from feeling the novel's traumatic jeopardy.
Swamplandia! claims some lyrical prose and some moving moments, but it would have been much more effective if it had dismissed its flirtations with spiritualism and confined itself to an examination of the disillusionment of adulthood. For this was, by far, the work's strength. In every other respect, this is a half-realized dream. 93/5 Stars)
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