Karen Russell
Featured Book
Book tours can be kind of a strange trip. Just ask Florida-born New Yorker Karen Russell. She recently returned from a week of readings and signings, a few in the east, a few out west, in support of her critically lauded debut novel Swamplandia! “And people kept asking me if I had heard the audiobook — I think as a kind critique of how I was reading it,” she says, laughing.
Wait a minute. They listened to you read and were like, “Uh, the other girl’s better”?
“Totally.”
Well, the audiobook version of Swamplandia!, narrated by Arielle Sitrick and David Ackroyd, is gripping.
The tour had plenty of highlights for Russell, like meeting Carl Hiaasen and reading his glowing review of her book. “It meant a lot, because I explicitly thought, when I was writing it: It’s really his turf.” She’s talking about South Florida, the epicenter for Hiaasen’s wild thrillers and the thumping, hunting heartbeat beneath Swamplandia! It’s in the Everglades that Russell builds the titular theme park, an island surrounded by murk and mystery, but only a ferry ride away from mainland civilization. Swamplandia! is home to a 13-year-old alligator wrestler-in-training named Ava and the rest of the Bigtree family, whose powers of self-invention and self-delusion seem to be its strength as much as its Achilles heel. Through vivid images and carefully casual sentences, Russell details the downfall of our haplessly non-heroic family and its fragile kingdom. The humor is often offset by heartbreak which is often offset by moments of pure literary bliss.
You did some readings in your home state, do you feel like you passed the smell test, the Florida test?
There was one guy, grew up in Fort Lauderdale, who was telling me that he thought I got it right. And that meant a lot because I don’t have that direct contact. You know, my parents were not alligator hunters and we weren’t right on the lip of the Everglades or anything. I was, like, eating pretzels at the mall, so it’s nice.
So you weren’t like Ava, touring the Everglades or the Thousand Islands by boat alone as a 13-year-old?
Incredibly, no. We lived right by the water until Hurricane Andrew — there used to be this amazing, murky, salty area. But it was maybe a couple acres, it was no giant swampland, and I could always see my neighbor’s house, so…it was nowhere near as harrowing as what Ava had to face.
What happened after Hurricane Andrew? Did you guys move or…?
My brother and my sister and I went to live with these cousins that we just had the vaguest sense of, you know? Just like the branch of the family tree that you can’t make out in the mist, you’re like, are those our third cousins? Who are those guys? And they very kindly took us in. My parents stayed. Our house was fully destroyed so my parents stuck around to do repairs. We just bailed water because you could still see the water mark was across the ceiling.
I think I was in sixth grade, and that was really cataclysmic. You know, I remember feeling really festive right before the storm — because you didn’t have any true concept of what’s coming and it was super devastating for all of Miami. So anyway, we went to Pennsylvania.
Were you able to go back to the house, the same house?
Yeah, we did. It was recently bulldozed because we didn’t have the money to get it up to code limits. It’s some complicated, but probably very necessary, new legislation that parts of the house couldn’t be below sea level. You had to have new repairs and stuff. So we lived there until recently.
Do you miss it?
I miss the old house. I do and I don’t…We’re all glad that our parents made it out of that house because every time it rained they had this elaborate baroque system where they would get 19 buckets out. So I think it’s probably okay, you know?
But you weren’t quite swamp people?
We weren’t. That was our tame experience. You know, the house flooded mildly and there were, like, lizards in the shower, but we weren’t swamp people.
The theme park in Swamplandia! is inspired, at least partly, by those very Floridian road side attractions like Gatorland. Did you go to those growing up?
We spent a lot of time at Parrot Jungle and Monkey Jungle, which was like the lesser jungle. That was like the B side. And Orlando was our standard destination — it’s maybe a four-hour drive from our house, so we had whatever resident’s pass you get. And I was totally seduced by those places as a kid. I loved theme parks, I loved the curated experience. I loved that so much effort had gone into them, someone imagining what a kid would want.
Even though it wasn’t quite on, and sometimes that would make me really sad. I think most kids have that reaction; it’s sort of the circus reaction where there is wonder but there’s also some acknowledgement. You could see the themes of this fantasy and it’s painful, you know? You can feel the strain…Especially in some of these smaller parks. Like Disney was this air-conditioned machine and didn’t feel quite as human as some of the places in the Everglades themselves.
Some of these roadside places still exist. And I remember just having a complicated reaction where it was sort of amazing and astonishing but also I felt like oh, it’s our guile that’s the engine of these places, you know? You really have to be willing to be duped for them to work and it takes effort. Everybody is making a big effort here, the tourists and the people who run the mom and pop places.
As a kid you feel like it’s your obligation to supply the wonder sometimes, right? We’re like “Oh my god, look at that unicorn!” even though it’s like a goat with a horn taped on to it or whatever.
And I think you made a version of it that was amazing and tough to imagine someone pulling off, you know? Swamplandia! the theme park is so isolated.
Yeah.
And there’s wrestling, there’s alligator wrestling, which, it’s just an amazing next-level version of those roadside parks.
Thank you. I was thinking that they’re in a really unique position, these kids, because on the one hand they are really off the grid, they’re like 40 miles from the mainstream society or whatever, from the mainland contemporary south Florida. Which would not be plausible in real life, I mean I think the park rangers would come and deport them.
You know, they’d be like, “Time to go to public school, get in the car, kids.” I don’t think you could live in that kind of seclusion, run a business in the heart of what is now really a national park. But thank goodness, you know? I think part of the fantasy of it for me was just this idea — the tourists are coming every day, so every day you have waves of people from the outside cresting, falling over you. But at the end of the day, these guys really are alone on their island.
And the Bigtrees, they know about lots of mainland stuff. They’re not like unfrozen cave men.
Right.
But when they have to deal with the specifics of mainstream life, it gets tough. Specifically the eldest kid, Kiwi, when he has to deal with life on the outside, it’s like “I don’t know how to talk to this kind of person or have this kind of conversation.”
Right.
So it’s amazing because we know they’re not aliens, they have conversations in English, they have a TV…
You know, I have this embarrassing affection for that Brendan Frasier movie Encino Man. I don’t know, I saw it at the right time or I must have felt just that clueless when I saw it. I was like, “It’s hard, isn’t it, cave guy?” But it’s true, it’s like when you learn a language from books and then you go to that country and usage is so fantastically different.
Just the shock of being like, “Oh my god, what did I study? None of it applies here.” I think the Kiwi character, he had his field notes, he had his vocabulary cards of mainland slang and it all comes to naught when he’s forced to have real human interactions.
It’s funny because his journey into the unknown is a journey into something closer to what the reader would know. The crasser world, the supposedly tamer world.
It is a wilderness, though, right? I’m glad that felt like a parallel because I do think it is. I used to take these teenagers abroad as a sort of counselor person and the limits always struck me. You can only chaperone, you can only protect up to a certain point and then it was like, “Oh my god, good luck. You poor 16-year-olds.” Because there’s so much that they’re navigating and it’s just a tough time, trying to negotiate your own identity.
Yeah. And you feel like you’re taking a crash course in human interactions around that age.
And there’s the rules that you were led to believe would protect you, of etiquette and stuff — it’s just there’s no ref anymore. I think that’s why Lord of the Flies resonates with so many people — even if you’re not on a William Golding island, even if you’re just working your first job or at recess, it’s like, “Call off your dogs. Will no man stand up and stop this madness?”
I thought about just that sort of unregulated stuff. I think for Kiwi what’s so hard is that place is the anonymity. It’s what he professed to want; he doesn’t want to be Kiwi Bigtree, this goofy, phony Indian alligator wrestler, he wants to have an authentic self and how impossible that feels even when he gets to the mainland.
So this book got its start in the story “Ava Wrestles the Alligators,” which was included in your first book, the collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Was there something about these characters — Ava and her older sister, ghost-crazy Osceola — maybe some unfinished business?
Yeah, I like that. Yeah, there was unfinished business, man. I left those girls in a really dangerous place, you know?
I really felt obsessed with them, the same way that Ossie is obsessed with these ghosts. The Ossie character really freaked me out — I found there was something frightening at the core of her. She seemed so hungry and so unconscious and that’s the force that I left Ava to contend with, and Ava ends up being the protagonist of the book. There was a lot of menace lurking in that story and it felt like a beginning. Some of the other stories felt like I was very happy to double knot the Hefty bag and be like, “To you, readers, good luck.”
But you put Ava and Ossie in this precarious position.
Yeah, isn’t that a funny thing? It used to puzzle me when authors would say, “The character did something I never predicted and didn’t want the character to do,” or like, “I wept when I killed my character.” Like, wait a second. It sounded kind of real mystic Deepak Chopra or something.
I was looking at the story recently, because I get this question a lot and I felt like I was maybe telling lies, you know? But I really think all the seeds in the novel are there. I think it’s all acorned away there.
Part of your job as an author is to build something awesome and then do battle with it. And with the opening chapters of Swamplandia! — wherein the matriarch Hillola Bigtree dives into the pool of alligators — you made a place and you made people and a situation that as a reader you almost wish would last for a long, long time.
Yeah, I was thinking about the very beginning; that didn’t exist in the original short story, just the mom doing her show. And I had a conversation with a friend and we were talking about these little Eden bubbles, I think that’s what we called them. These really perfect memories that you sense could never have been that perfect as lived.
You even have that sense that that in itself is a fantasy. A little theme park snow globe. But it contains whatever you loved best about your childhood….I think it would have been really beautiful to Ava. But I think, too, about the way it’s also pretty humble and pretty shabby.
With the exception of tourists, Chief Bigtree and the family rarely have to think outside their kingdom.
Right. And I think that’s the appeal for somebody like the Chief and it is probably an appeal for a lot of, you know, even suburban patriarchs, this idea that you get to be the sovereign of your own kingdom. But also in that culty Jonestown way. You take that thinking to its extreme and there are some dangers too.
Right. Well, you need a steady hand if you’re going to rule. For the most part I trust the Chief, although he makes dubious…
He makes a few dubious calls, yeah. Yeah, that’s very generous.
Part of what makes this book so powerful is that you really want to believe that Ava’s journey through the swamp with the menacing Bird Man really is a trip to the Underworld to save her big sister who’s run off with a ghost and not, you know, some terrible abduction.
Right, right, absolutely.
That’s part of the power of the book, making the reader emotionally hook into Ava and hold on and think, “Please let this be the way the world is.”
You know, I don’t think it works that way for every reader so I’m so glad to hear it worked that way for you. That’s absolutely where the power was for me, sitting in the skiff with Ava and doing that calculus with her.
Looking for those clues along with her, you know? One of the things that was interesting to me metaphorically about the alligators is that once you get their jaws shut up they can’t open them again. They can clamp down with incredible force but once they’ve done that action, if you can shut their jaws, for some fluky reason it’s really weak. And I was thinking about how difficult it is in life. Once you’ve made a decision and once you’ve committed to a certain kind of journey, you really are blinkered. You really do want to find evidence that you’re right, your view is correct, your way of seeing the situation is correct. And for Ava in particular there are so many reasons why I would imagine it would feel essential to believe that this person, that she’s on her way to an underworld, you know?
There’s a delusion in all the Bigtrees. Ava is perhaps the most forgivable, being the youngest, but all of them have to come face to face with the harshness of the real world.
Yeah. It is forgivable because she’s young, right?
But I don’t know that everybody necessarily grows out of…I don’t think it’s just a child’s wish, for the sublime, or to have some connection with some other realm. I don’t think that necessarily goes away, I just think that if you’re reading it in an adult character you’re like, he’s crazy or some “Boo” Radley. Where you’re like oh, he’s challenged.
Because the Chief, I mean he knows. He’s got to know, right?
Sort of, right? But I think people are amazing architects in their own brains. People can partition their own experience in incredible ways. And kids also, I mean kids are particularly good at that, but I think everyone is.
And the Chief lives at home on an island surrounded by alligators basically, they all do and it just might be the place where they can best survive.
Right, right. I was thinking that that is probably disappointing for some readers but it’s disappointing for me too in some ways, the idea that the alligators end up being the least menacing thing in some respects, the least dangerous thing they have to deal with.
You mean how they say if you put a gun in the movie it’s got to go off?
Yeah.
You feel like some people might have wanted a gator attack?
Right, exactly. Like it turns into some big gator shoot ‘em up or you know, like. Like Jaws-style. The alligator bursts out of a casino or something.
