Embracing Weirdness: What I Missed in Swamplandia! (Or Did I?)

After thoroughly not enjoying Swamplandia! I went searching the internet to help understand why so many people were totally on board with this acclaimed book that I didn't like at all.

It's clear Karen Russell is phenomenally talented, first of all. Nobody that gets a major work of fiction published in the first place is a hack. (No, not even Dan Brown.) Further, nobody that gets recommended for the freaking Pulitzer Prize is without an abundance of talent. (We can happily exclude poor Dan Brown from that particular list!) So it's not about talent, it's just about personal preference. And I love figuring out why my personal preference hasn't, in this case, lined up with what seems to be the General Critical Consensus ("GCC").

This interview with Karen Russell from my favorite site, The Millions, gave me a lot of important context. It's instructive to hear how inspired she was by George Saunders, another writer I like but that I know other people loveloveLOVE. I can see how she's inspired by Saunders' zaniness. But three key differences between George Saunders and Russell:

1) Saunders is really really funny, like hilariously funny, and

2) Saunders has the gift of making you care deeply almost instantly, and lastly

3) Saunders is generally working in allegory.

I never felt emotionally connected to the characters in Swamplandia, and I never felt like it was all that funny. It was also too literal; as far as I can tell it was meant to take place on Earth, in the present day. Saunders tends to operate in the future or some cracked-mirror version of Earth. If Swamplandia! was meant to be in an alternate version of our planet that was not at all clear to me. There were some amusing moments and lines, but mostly I would describe it as "zany" or "kooky" or "looney" rather than "Funny." Yet it makes sense to me that Russell sees this book as Saunders-esque. It helps me get what kind of a tone and mood she was going for. Obviously some people feel she succeeded; that's great.

Another interview with The Rumpus that she gave when her most recent work came out gives some further insight. The key here is her love of short stories: 

You can really come at some of the same themes and preoccupations from different angles, sort of like turning the facets of a little jewel. And then you can also hop bodies and continents, so there’s sort of this pinwheeling freedom, but there’s also this way you can maybe achieve a composite portrait of something that’s different than what you can do with a novel. You can occupy these really different points of view from story to story.

But this sounds like exactly what was going on in Swamplandia -- taking different qualities and moods and tones and characters and combining them, no matter how discordant. Perhaps that kind of stylistic hybrid is really better suited for a short story collection where each piece can stand apart? Or maybe I just parochially like my fiction slightly more straightforward, my genres less commingled?

What's clear is that for a lot of people this book really worked -- people responded to the humor and wild shifts and nuttiness. I always hate to think I missed something -- some key plot point or character moment -- that would part the clouds and change my mind in a burst of sunlight. But in this case I think it's purely just a matter of taste and preference. Exactly what I didn't like was precisely what a lot of people loved. Weird! But good to know! To each their own!