Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This was our book club selection this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. I didn’t specifically have this one on my list, but it did make the Pulitzer finalist list back in 2011. The book was nominated by my wife.
Swamplandia! is a bit of a difficult book to completely classify. It is kind of Southern Gothic in mood and in the grotesque and malevolent characters. But it isn’t about the Southern aristocracy. Rather the opposite, as it deals with low class white characters, mostly. It is definitely high quality writing, but also feels more accessible than much of modern literary fiction. It is a coming of age story - two of them, really. And it is also about the trauma of the loss of a parent. And it is also seriously funny in many places.
It also does have a scene where a 12 year old girl is raped, so be warned if that will be an issue for you. (It’s not particularly graphic, it isn’t long, it is a key moment in the plot, and the victim is able to assert herself afterward in a positive way.)
Swamplandia! is the title, but it is also the name of the fifth-rate amusement park/tourist trap in the Ten Thousand Islands area of the western Florida coast run by the family at the center of the book. The exclamation point is important in both names.
The park centers around alligators, with the highlight being the high dive into an alligator pit performed by the mother, Hilola Bigtree. Running this place has been a generational effort, since the patriarch got scammed into buying worthless land back in the day. He created a pretendian back story, complete with a “museum” of family artifacts, and a whole mythology of primordial gator wrestling.
Problems arise, however, when Grandpa Sawtooth gets dementia and has to be placed in a facility. And then Hilola dies of cancer, leaving “The Chief,” the father of the family, and his three children, to manage a park that suddenly has no main event and eventually no customers.
The Chief leaves for the mainland, ostensibly for “business,” leaving the children to fend for themselves amid a mountain of debts and boredom.
First, the oldest, Kiwi, leaves and goes to work for low wages at the competing park, The World of Darkness - a thoroughly tacky Hell-based experience. Then, the middle child, Osceola, has a mental break, decides she is in love with a ghost from a dredge accident back during the Depression, and elopes with him.
This leaves twelve-year-old Ava all alone, until she meets with the mysterious Bird Man, who convinces her to set off with him for the gates of the underworld to look for Osceola.
Thereafter, there are two main threads. Kiwi’s experience working and trying to get his high school diploma is social satire and humor, although with an edge of ambivalence, as Kiwi feels guilt for leaving yet also loves being independent.
The other thread is Ava’s journey through the islands of the mangroves searching for her sister.
Because the writing is excellent, the book draws you into the world completely. Even though things feel a bit exaggerated and over the top, they really aren't, for the most part. The tacky tourist traps of this sort used to be an American phenomenon, particularly along well-traveled routes like the old Route 66 here in the western US. There are ghost parks all over the country, particularly east of the Mississippi, and rotting roadside “attractions” out west.
Really, the only potentially unrealistic element is the supernatural. I mean, are the ghosts real? Does Osceola actually see and talk to them? Is the old laundry witch the ghost of the historical figure? The answers to these questions are unclear - the book leaves a lot of ambiguity, not least because the story is told mostly from Ava and Kiwi’s respective perspectives. Kiwi doesn’t believe in the supernatural. And Ava never does see or hear any ghosts, so she is skeptical.
The ending isn’t exactly tragic - the beginning is really more so - but like any significant transition, it is painful. Life can never just go one the way it has. People die, children grow up, tourist tastes change, society moves on.
There are some excellent lines in the book. In the passage on how the “Indian” heritage was created, The Chief explains why creating the legend was so important:
“Tradition is as important, kids, as promotional materials are expensive.”
And promotional billboards, with purple prose and puffery are the central promotion for Swamplandia!
Although there was not a drop of Seminole or Miccosukee blood in us, the Chief always costumed us in tribal apparel for the photographs he took. He said we were “our own Indians.”
As the kids get older, however, they start to see through all of this, with even Ava, the kid who believes most in the park, realizing that her dad looks pretty silly in his fake regalia.
As someone who works with seniors a lot in my legal practice, as well as nursing home and Medicaid issues, I did have to laugh a little at the description of the care home.
The seniors got issued these pastel pajamas that made them look like Easter eggs in wheelchairs. If you went to visit, that’s what you saw: Easter eggs in these adult cribs, Easter eggs on toilets with guardrails.
Don’t get me wrong here. I advocate for good care, and help people get it when they need it. And I do have a lot of respect for the many good people who care for our elders, often at criminally low wages. This was just a fun visual, and a bit of a gentle dig at the way institutions do things.
The best satire comes in the Kiwi-narrated chapters. He finds himself - a sheltered homeschooled kid from a rather eccentric family - suddenly thrust into a strange world. A guy named Vijay takes him under his wing, not always in the most sensible way, but in ways that are quite funny.
There are also the usual suspects, the sort of losers who tend to bully anyone who is different. One is described by Kiwi in his own mind.
Oh my God, you are not even an original asshole! You are a plagiarist of assholes.
Yep, most assholes are. If they had imagination, they probably wouldn’t be assholes.
Throughout the book, the author fills in the history of the area. The Everglades have long been targeted for draining and exploitation, yet they have resisted human control. From the sale of worthless land, to the dredging that never did open waterways, to the many attempts to create arable land in the swamp.
In one case, trees were imported from Australia, and seeded throughout the swamp. The intent was that the trees would stabilize the soil, and eventually be cut down so crops could be planted. This failed spectacularly, with the new trees becoming an invasive weed, crowding out native plants, and making dense, impassible, unclearable miles of wasteland.
The trees were a species of Melaleuca, which is something that my own family has a history with. There are lots of species, and the ones introduced to Florida were not the same as the “tea tree” ones that are the source of a particular oil claimed to have medicinal properties. Back in the 1990s, my late grandfather, who kind of dabbled in this and that - he was a real estate agent in his 60s and 70s as his most steady form of employment - sold tea tree oil through a MLM. My family went along with it, as it was a fairly harmless hobby, and it also gave the rest of the family a chance to subsidize income for my grandfather, who didn’t have much retirement savings.
As a homeschool kid, I did find the approach to homeschooling in this book to be nuanced. On the one hand, the Bigtree kids lack contact with other kids - the geographical isolation is the main cause of that. However, they seem to get fairly good, if quirky, academic training. As Ava notes, there were gaps, but there were also things they learned that other kids did not. Grandpa Sawtooth taught them about the forgotten history, the black laborers left to die in a hurricane, the indigenous peoples forced off their lands, the marginalized communities that the government never bothered to help or even connect to the mainland.
“Prejudice,” as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic - a “damn fool math” - in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery on Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.
This is a brilliant insight. The MAGA movement is at its heart a primal scream that “Those People Do Not Count!” As the official position of the State of Florida, as articulated by its attorney, “woke” is the belief that there is systemic injustice and the need to do something about it. For MAGA, this is unacceptable. They are either in denial that injustice exists, or, more typically, they not only do not give a fuck about injustice, they wish there was a lot more of it in their favor.
Much of the book is the story of Ava, and her interior life is described throughout. I thought the author did a good job of making this interesting and relatable without making Ava into a full adult. She feels like a girl on the brink of womanhood, which she is. This line struck me as good:
Why was my mind feasting on the worst pictures?
This is a very human tendency, right? Always imagine the most horrible possibility. It is tough to blame Ava, of course, at this point in the story. The worst has already happened. Her coming of age happens when she faces things, lets go of the past (through a somewhat symbolic act of giving up her pet baby alligator to save herself), and takes her own rescue into her own hands.
Kiwi too starts to see things differently with experience. I thought this epiphany was a good one.
There was a story that travelled around the islands about a woman named Mama Weeds. A swamp witch. But now Kiwi saw that there were witches everywhere in the world. Witches lining up for free grocery bags of battered tuna cans and half-rotted carrots at the downtown Loomis Army of Mercy. At the bus station, witches telling spells to walls. Only the luckiest ones got to live inside stories. The rest were homeless, pushing carts like this one. They sank out of sight, like the European witches clutching their stones.
I guess that is a good example of this book. It can be very funny, an engrossing story that draws you in, a horror show, a satire, a musing on life and society. And all of it a once. It’s a worthwhile book.
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