Review: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book didn't do it for me. I probably should have abandoned ship halfway through, when I stopped to read not one, but two, other books. Instead, I came dutifully trudging back to deliver the coup de grace (to myself!).

So I'm not sure what all the buzz was about here. (NOW I understand (1/3rd of) the Pulitzer debacle!) I found almost no relation to actual human life in the pages of this book. I found almost no character or situation I could relate to or even imagine understanding. I found the plotting shoddy and the tone disjointed. Everything felt like some kind of confusing mix up -- like Paul Thomas Anderson somehow found himself directing an episode of Friends, with all the stars replaced by the cast of The Hobbit. Nothing about it made any sense whatsoever.

Now, there were certainly some lovely, elegiac passages of writing; some of the descriptions of grief and heartbreak really resonated. But that was it. Aside from those few (and far between) pages of beauty, any semblance of truth faded and was replaced by the Marx Brothers in a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Maybe for some of the people who loved this book it is exactly that kind of lunatic high-wire act that was appealing. Certainly if there are points to be awarded for unapologetic, aggressive, untethered weirdness, Karen Russell deserves all those points. Consider those points to be granted. Unfortunately, the rest of the scoreboard was disappointingly empty for me.

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