Having just finished Swamplandia! I think I developed an itch as I read, all from the book’s penchant with sweaty detritus. On some level I wanted a shower and hand sanitizer. The fact that Florida swamp water was consumed is disconcerting long after reading it. A girl convinced she’s about to marry a ghost and a younger girl bent on finding and saving her with ‘help’ from a birdman wearing a heavy coat made of feathers, the scent of which is the unwashed rising off the page. Swamplandia! is a novel about a ‘B’ level alligator attraction run by a family on a remote island in Florida. As is the case with many lower-level attractions I’ve visited on vacation, the place disappoints on several levels, including the alligator pit where the “seths” live. (I remember glimpsing a large bin of alligators while on vacation myself, bodies piled on top of one another, content to sleep in a sweltering July sun while, peering over the board fence, I quickly pulled back from the smell.)
The main attraction on Swamplandia! is provided by Hilola, wife of Big Chief Bigtree (he’s not actually an Indian but it’s part of the shtick) who dives off a board and swims through the alligator pit, emerging unscathed at the other end to the amazement of the bleacher crowd. I’m impressed too, until she dies and leaves the attraction without an anchor. Here is where the family starts to fall apart. In addition to the girls, their brother who is intellectually smart but socially naive, leaves the family to seek his fortune as does Big Chief whose endeavors are simply pointed to raising cash regardless how demeaning the job.
Not to give away the entire read, it’s extremely good prose and for that reason alone is worth reading. The writing is often gritty-seedy with phenomenal word choices throughout: don’t write with adverbs? unless your command of them is unique as in “tourists moved sproingily…” or “he’d flail evangelically…” and find verbs that bring unique sounds to a scratch as in “tractoring” a key across your arm. Make the filthiest things sophisticated with the noun “feculence” and use it twice in the same paragraph; capture the sound of a big, fast voice by an “as-if on a downhill slope.” Anyway the book has so much sludge and beauty. Sad and yet somehow redemptive. IMHO maybe too long with the Bird Man? And beyond that its greatest sin is including a young girl’s rape which added, again IMHO, nothing. But in the end, family is family and reunion is the reader’s reward.
To be fair, Swamplandia! was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and I would read it if for no other reason than to gain insight to Russell’s creative application of English parts of speech.
As for the Florida location, this is not, of course, a high priced venue in a costly resort, and it was interesting for me to consider the earthy nature of things, all slathered with perspiration. It took me back to a real trip I once took. It’s been maybe two dozen years since I made this trek and things might have changed but if not then if you travel between Orlando and Tampa, get a local map and piece together a road trip south of the expressway, using mainly county and state roads. This will give you an additional view of the nature of Swamplandia! You’ll find ramshackle shacks with wood smoke rising from chimneys even in the hottest humid heat of the day as the road winds through swampy sections of the landscape; most front yards are decorated with a variety of appliances and wheel-less cars and some broken farm equipment, all rusted to perfection, or a boat no longer serviceable up on blocks and maybe a clothesline running from it to the front door of the house. More likely than not, you’ll see NO TRESPASSING signs, stern, hand-painted in terse lettering as a warning to those who would violate the space (but you weren’t going to stop anyway.) In short, I sensed the locals were happiest when left alone and without social standards approaching even the slightest requirements of an HOA. It’s my land and I can do with it as I please: the essence of true freedom.
So with that background, I found it hard to consider the “attraction” of Swamplandia!-the-place, while Swamplandia!-the-novel was actually, as one of the book cover blurbs put it “lusciously written.” Just don’t drink the water.
Write&Read 
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