Swamplandia!

 Swampladia!

By Karen Russell

I picked this up a few weeks ago because it is set in the brackish swamp near the Everglades, which we

were about to visit over April break.

The book tells the story of the Bigtree family who operate a theme park, Swamplandia!, on an island, or hammock, in the Everglades area of Florida. Everything is going swimmingly until the star of the family, Hiolia, dies. She had been the main attraction of Swamplandia!; her act involved diving into a gator-filled pool and swimming around it unscathed. After her death, visitors stop coming, which is compounded by the opening of a nearby rival theme park, The World of Darkness. Or, just The World.

All of this pulls the rest of the Bigtree family -- Osceola, 16; Kiwi, 17; Ava, 13; and Chief, middle aged -- to the breaking point. Kiwi is the first to leave. He heads to the mainland to work at The World, both to scout its features but also to try to make some money that might get Swamplandia!'s creditors off the family's back. Next is the Chief, who goes on one of his semi-annual but mysterious business trips (which turns out to be emceeing at a depressing strip club). Osceola (Ossie), meanwhile, seems to have something of a psychotic break and begins spending her time with a Spiritualist book that, she believes, allows her to commune with the dead. She goes through a series of ghost boyfriends before deciding to elope with one of them, a former dredge boat worker who takes her deep into the swamp to a portal to the underworld that will allow them to marry. Ava, now alone, is distraught. She shares her story with an itinerant "bird man", whose "job" is to scare away buzzards from area businesses and homes. The bird man says he knows all about the underworld, and promises to take Ava there in an attempt to save Osceoloa.

The thing about the Bigtree family is that they've always lived in a fantasy world. Their last name, Bigtree, is, in fact, made up, designed to associate Swamplandia! with vague Native American roots. The Chief isn't a chief of anything. This idea is reinforced by a "museum" at the theme park that preserves various "artifacts" of the Bigtree story. They are, in fact, simply mementos from the family's life, trumped up to fill a kind of grand story.

And so it is easy to believe that Ava believes in this underworld, especially given the author's lovely description of the environment in which the Bigtree's live. It starts to make sense that there would be a portal to the underworld out there, and I was totally ready for this book to be about the magic that exists in the most special places in our world, in nature. It seemed like it would be, even more than 250 pages in.

But that was not to be. The Birdman is not who Ava thinks he is. As a reader, I wanted to see him like Ava did. Looking back, though, it was clear: this is a shady character. In a scene that shocked me, that seemed to rip me from the charming and, many times, funny, tale I had bought into, Ava is raped. It still turns my stomach thinking about it. Ava is very violently torn from her fantasy world. 

And so it goes with the other Bigtrees. Kiwi learns that he cannot single-handedly save the family's home. He learns, too, that his sense of himself as a scholar -- no schools at Swamplandia!, only homeschool -- is misguided. He has a lot to learn. Osceola's ghost leaves her, just in the nick of time, the noose that would serve as a "portal" swinging in the background when she is rescued. And the Chief accepts that he will have to become a mainlander after all. The silver lining: when the fantasy bubble is burst, the family realizes that they are far stronger together than they are apart.

This was certainly an engrossing book. I found the ending jarring, to say the least. The rape scene made me feel a little betrayed by the author and, after looking at some online reviews, others have felt similarly. I still wonder whether it was necessary. I wonder whether Ava could have gotten away and the story would have been the same. 

Buckeye

 Buckeye

By Patrick Ryan

Cal is born with one leg significantly shorter than the other, and so can't go off and fight in World War II.
Which, it turns out, is a blessing and a curse. He does his best to help out, joining the local defense patrol to keep a watch on the streets and skies of Bonhomie, OH, but, soon enough, he'll be one of the few men of a certain age left in town. His father is glad; he is not.

Still, it works out okay for him. He meets a girl, Becky, who soon becomes his wife. Becky's dad runs a local hardware store and offers him a job that is a good sight better than his work at a local cement factory. His father-in-law pays for a house. A child comes. Life is good.

But, then, trouble. Becky is...quirky, some might say. She reads. She works at a stationary store. She wears a beret. She says things. Oh, and she might be able to commune with the spirit world. What else can explain how she was able to locate the body of a man who went missing and wound up dead in his car on the side of the road? With war in full swing, Becky uses her gift to help the many people hoping to reconnect with their loved ones.

But Cal doesn't believe.

Which is fine, for a while, until one day, when Cal, at the behest of his father-in-law, runs out of town a quack author who is ostensibly writing a book about spirit mediums but apparently just wants to get into Becky's pants. Becky is not amused -- she can handle herself. And then it comes out: Cal really doesn't believe. The two move into separate bedrooms.

So when the woman who came into the basement of the hardware store to listen to the radio and kiss him on what turned out to be VE day reappears and seems to suggest that perhaps they could do more than kiss, Cal is in a rough enough place emotionally to accept. 

The woman, Margaret, has a husband overseas. But their marriage isn't what Margaret had hoped for. She's said yes to Felix's proposal because, frankly, she didn't know better. She'd grown up in an orphanage, and was looking for stable ground. Plus, Felix was handsome. That said, he seemed far less interested in sex than the men Margaret had been seeing casually, and his libido didn't seem to pick up in matrimony. Felix, it turned out, was gay, though she didn't know it. Two things filled her with dread: Felix dying and Felix returning home.

He does return home after his ship is torpedoed and the man he had fallen in love with dies. He comes back an even more broken and confused man than he was when he left. He is able to make love to Margaret on the first night of his homecoming. So the baby that comes could be his. But it isn't. Which is when the lies begin.

Felix is able to find peace through Becky, who is able to contact Augie, Felix's love, from beyond the grave. The message: live -- for both of them. But in connecting with Augie, Felix inadvertently introduces his son-not-son to Becky and Cal's son, Skip. So things become complicated. Especially when Margaret learns of Felix's affair and Felix learns of Margaret's affair and Margaret tells Becky about her affair -- and then Margaret, overwhelmed (or something else) leaves town. 

The news she leaves, and her departure itself, is like a bomb for the two families. But eventually they heal. And it is in the telling of this healing -- even after Skip dies in Vietnam and Tom, his half brother, distances himself from everyone after learning the truth -- that the beauty of this novel lies. It is sweet, and tender, and sad, and uplifting all at the same time. I loved it. 

Mother Night

 Mother Night

By Kurt Vonnegut

This is another entry in the Anthony Jeselnick book club. It's a new Vonnegut for me that I'd never heard
of.

Like all Vonnegut, it's an absurd tale. The main character, Howard Campbell Jr., was born in the United States but moved to Germany soon after with his family. By the time the Nazis took over, he had built a life there as a playwright and had married a German woman. So while his parents moved back to upstate New York, he stayed. Since his wife was a well-known actress and he a well-known author, his social circle included the upper echelon of Nazi leadership, and soon he was recruited as a propagandist.

But he was also recruited by the Americans, who convinced him to use well-timed pauses in his broadcasts to convey secret information to their leadership. He never knew what information he was passing along, and no one ever suspected his involvement. And, after the war, no one on the American side would acknowledge it, either. They kept him out of jail through behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Still, Nazi hunters still regarded him as an enemy that needed to be brought to justice.

They came knocking on his door one day after Howard's new friend, who himself was an agent of the Russians, learned of his true identity and tipped off a group of neo-Nazis, who published a celebration of news of Campbell's being alive and well, which, in turn, tipped off Nazi hunters. Fleeing for his life, he is embraced by a rag-tag but rich group of neo-Nazis, which include the "Black Fuhrer" and a former priest defrocked for his bigotry (and drunkenness).

It's all told as a memoir written in an Israeli jail as Campbell waits for his trial. So the whole book, we, the reader, are wondering: How did he get there? The twist -- spoiler alert -- it was Campbell who turned himself in. When he receives a letter from the American who recruited him as a spy saying he will testify at the trial and save him, Campbell holds himself accountable for his misdeeds with a rope.

Ah, Vonnegut. It was all so much more humorous than I related above. Somehow, he still seems so radical in his absurdity. We need another Vonnegut for these times.