Baby, Book, and Banjo : Tim Westover's Blog

Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! has been getting a lot of buzz (they’re even going to make an HBO miniseries from it). And for the first 83% of the book, I was on board, I was loving it. The premise (the dissolution of the Bigtree family of alligator wrestles following the death of their matriarch) is amazing; the writing is great (orate, lush, and surprising); the characters are intriguing. The rival Hell-themed amusement park is inspired in its details.

But there is a scene 83% of the way through the book that almost made me want to give up, and the book never recovered from this moment.

Spoilers ahoy:

That scene is the rape of the 13-year-old narrator by the seedy “Obi-Wan” of the novel, the Bird Man. I understand that powerful literature deals with dramatic, often profoundly repulsive moments. These moments change the lives of their participants forever. But the scene seems to have very little emotional weight for Ava, the narrator / victim. Her takeaway is “Huh, he raped me, so maybe I shouldn’t trust him anymore.” But maybe that’s the point? That’s how a tough-as-nails 13-year-old from the Florida swamp would deal with the situation? Somehow, I don’t think so. The language that Russell uses for the scene is unpleasant — almost voyeuristic, and I didn’t want to read it.

And then, the plot of the novel goes to pieces. Ava’s familiar, a red baby alligator, who has been an important symbol through the whole novel, is sacrificed uselessly. The quest narrative that had been driving half the book peters into nothingness. Ava doesn’t complete her mission to save her sister; that’s done by accident, when her brother accidentally lands his sea plane and happens to find her.

There is no resolution for the story of the Bigtree clan; no monumental showdown between father and son, children and parents, bank and alligator farm, dream and reality.The denouement plays out too quickly, in just a few pages. The farm is lost, the girls dress up in school uniforms and wrestle no more alligators forever.

The resolution doesn’t seem motivated by the forgoing story. We were acquainted with exceptional characters; they never learn that they aren’t exceptional, but they become ordinary anyway. This basic plot movement, though dark and dispiriting, could be very powerful. And Russell doesn’t deliver on it at all. I can see how it is supposed to work from Ava’s victimization, sacrifice, and ineffectuality, but it just doesn’t come together.

Read Swamplandia! 83% of it is amazing. Stop before the end and imagine a better one.

"American Lightning" by Howard Blum

Blum’s “American Lightning” is a work of popular history, in the vein of Simon Winchester or Erik Larson, but Blum’s book is neither as readable or entertaining as those he’s trying to imitate. Blum attempts to weave together three threads: Billy Burns investigating the bombing of the Los Angeles Time’s building, the contemporary life of Clarence Darrow, who will represent the bombers at their trial, and the early film career of D.W. Griffith.

The Burns sections make up a good, procedure detective story, rather like an episode of Law & Order. Burns and his operatives collect clues, interview witnesses, tail suspects, and finally get their men (probably). The stage is set for a showdown between capital and labor, embodied in the trial of the bombers. Unfortunately for future novelistic-historians, the trial ends with a whimper, and so does the book.

This is only a third of the book, though. The other two stories have interesting moments, but are disconnected from the whole. Clarence Darrow defends the bombers at their trial, but the book spends far too much time on his complicated professional and personal life in the years before the trial, which is unnecessary to understand the main tale. Similarly, the story of D. W. Griffith and early Hollywood has interesting moments, but it even more disconnected from the main thread of the “plot.” As far as I can tell, the only points of connection between Griffith and Burns are (1) that they briefly collaborated once on a different case and (2) that the labor unions, aiming for sympathy for the bombers, who are connected with organized labor, made their own film. Their propaganda piece was inspired by Griffith’s idea that “movies could be polemical” (apparently an idea that he invented, according to Blum), but Griffith was not involved in the film that was made about the bombers.

Omitting the stories of Griffith and Darrow would have made for a shorter, tighter book. The main “plot” is fascinating (almost more by what didn’t happen and what could have happened), but “American Lightning” is overlong, over-stuffed, and too disconnected to be a leading example of the “popular history” genre.

"Georgia Curiosities" by William Schemmel

I’ve probably read twenty books in the “Weird Georgia” genre. They are all more or less the same: collections of odd people, places, and historical events from Georgia’s past. A little Civil War, some ghost stories, some historical markers, some birthplaces of famous people. Half for tourists on the road, half armchair traveler’s guide.

A lot of the stories in this book are found in other books as well, but I think “Georgia Curiosities” does a very good job collecting a large representative sample of diverse stories and places to visit. Most of the highlights from other similar books are present here, and I was surprised that “Georgia Curiosities” actually had a few unique stories and places to share. It was worth reading just for its dozen or so new curiosities.

The writing is, like all book in the genre, adequate. Sometimes, it comes across as too glib or trying too hard to be funny or clever. But it doesn’t get in the way of the stories or locations.

If you’re only going to read one book in the genre, you could do worse than “Georgia Curiosities.”

"Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson

I don’t normally read quiet historical books about aging rural preachers in Iowa writing to their young children. None of the themes — intergenerational conflicts, small-town religion and morals, racial politics, or even the landscape of Iowa — are interesting to me. But I loved Gilead.

Gilead is a very quiet book. It’s not brash, dramatic, or exciting, but it is still compelling. The narrator is exceedingly pleasant and friendly, though not ingratiating, which makes his one prejudice seem both irrational and intriguing. His insights are thoughtful without being preachy (which is a trick for a book about a preacher), and thought the epistolary / “letters to my child who can’t read them” format could be grating, Robinson succeeds at avoiding the treacly traps.

I was a little disappointed at the end; the final reveal seemed a bit anti-climactic, perhaps a little too moral and too neat, without room for moral ambiguity. But for a quiet book that does not trade or highs or lows, the ending was probably fitting.

"Atlantic" by Simon Winchester

The best Winchester books read like great novels: they are character-driven, with surprising plot turns, and unfold linearly, like a good story. “Atlantic” is none of these things, and yet it is still an enjoyable read. Winchester’s vague structure framework groups broad themes together: economic activity, exploration, geology, military conflict, politics, and more. He begins with the formation of the world and continues through the modern day, aiming to cover most areas of human interaction with the Atlantic, so he earns one star at least for the Titanic-sized ambition.

Many of Winchester’s stories and themes are familiar from other history and pop-history books: the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic, the Middle Passage of slavery, the Falkland Islands conflict, the early Portuguese navigators, cod fishing, global warming. At times, the stories go pretty far inland, and some are weighed down by over-long descriptive passages of the grayness of the sea.

Some of his claims are, as others have said, a bit of a stretch: I found his hinting that the Atlantic Ocean was responsible for parliamentary government (because Iceland had the first one) to seem particularly far-fetched.

However, in the final tally, stitching together all these stories in one book, which does move fairly quickly from topic to topic, is entertaining enough, and good panorama of human activity on the Atlantic Ocean.

In reading Winchester’s latest, I was reminded of Bill Bryson’s latest, “At Home.” Like Bryson’s book, “Atlantic” is bound together by a loose framework, switches stories, and feels disconnected. Yet almost every anecdote is entertaining: some personal, some ancient, some modern, some vast, some small.

Let's Play White by Chesya Burke

Children with eerie powers. Powerful women, some with command of hoodoo. Blood. Dead babies. These are the recurring elements in Chesya Burke’s “Let’s Play White.” I had heard these stories described “horror”, but I think “macabre magical realism” might be a better description. The stories are not pleasant, but many are quite powerful.

Several of her stories are non-genre stories with an eerie twist. “Walter and the Three-Legged King” is a social-economic story that happens to feature a talking rat in a key role. “I Make People Do Bad Things” is a gangland-style tale of whore houses and numbers games, and a little girl’s eerie powers are the most powerful weapon. “Chocolate Park” is a story of drugs, prostitution, and revenge that’s enacted by hoodoo.

Violence is very present in all of Burke’s stories here — even very depraved violence — but the violence is not particularly graphic. She doesn’t linger over the depravity, but she doesn’t shy from it. I wouldn’t recommend reading all the stories in one sitting, as I did: the violence loses its effectiveness from repetition.

Burke’s stories at times make use of African (and African-American) folklore, and her characters are usually black, but the plots don’t turn on race. Because the book was framed with quotes from Dunbar and DuBois, I thought that race was going to play a larger role. Even the title, “Let’s Play White,” announces some kind of racial opposition or masquerade that I just didn’t feel was terribly present in the stories. I don’t see this as a positive or negative; there is room for literature that confronts racial issues, and there is room for literature that has black folklore and black characters without becoming all about race. I feel that Burke’s collection belongs to the latter.

A few of her stories fall short for me. “CUE: Change,” a lighter zombie story, feels out-of-place. “The Room Where Ben Disappeared” feels like a Victorian ghost story, but without weight. “The Light of Cree” is too short to make much of an impact. And “Purse” (also very short) feels like a bad student writing exercise. That’s four of the eleven stories, but the bulk of the page count is in the remaining seven, which I think are more successful.

Burke is at her best when she gives herself time to develop full characters. “Walter and the Three-Legged King” does this quickly and economically; “I Make People Do Bad Things” and “The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason” are longer. This last story is the standout of the collection — it visits all her recurring themes (children with eerie powers, powerful women, dead babies, and violence), but does so against a backdrop of real character progression and a well-realized setting.

I thought that I would be an ideal reader for Catherynne Valente’s Deathless, her 2011 work of magical realism and Russian folklore. This particular brand of fiction is what I read and what I write. I’ve familiar with most of the folk tales and practices on which her work is based. I’ve taken courses on Russian literature and history and toured both Moscow and St. Petersburg extensively. I speak enough Russian to understand the references (not quite puns) in the character and geographic names. But all of this, I’ve found, actually makes me less than an ideal reader for Deathless — my dilettantish dabbling into various parts of Russian culture leaves me equipped with neither of the frameworks I could use to appreciate the novel.

If I weren’t familiar with the source material, I would be more awed by the strangeness of Valente’s work and the striking images she presents — a world of eggs, feathers, huts with chicken legs, galloping pestles, magical villages, and house spirits. Valente casts these elements into beautiful English prose, but they are not her inventions. The banya ritual, with its bizarre lashing by birch branches, is a beloved Russian pastime, typically enjoyed with alcohol and picked victuals. Baba Yaga, Koschei the Deathless, firebirds and mustard plasters (and even the main character, Marya Morevna) are all part of the Russian folk tradition. And if I had absorbed the source material through a lifetime of culture, rather than a few book and college courses and weeks abroad, I could better appreciate Valente’s inversions, re-castings, and transformations. Deathless is a catalog of Russian folk lore stitched into a novel.

The overall plot is impelled by the demands of the fairy tale, not the motivations of the characters, inevitability without agency. Goldilocks has to eat the three bears’ porridge, else she wouldn’t be Goldilocks — she has no choice in the matter. Similarly, Marya Morevna has no choice in her interactions with Koschei the Deathless.  They are preordained by centuries of Russian tradition. ”Why” or “How” are not a question one can ask of fairy tales, and they doesn’t figure into Valente’s novel, either. It’s better to let the striking images and strong, direct language exist as points and not attempt to resolve them into a coherent outline of a plot.

The real world / Soviet elements of the story aren’t as well fleshed-out as I’d hoped. This is a shame, because they are among the more intriguing ideas.  What would Baba Yaga or the Firebird have done at the Siege of Leningrad? The domovoi (house spirits) organizing themselves into soviets and committees is brilliant (they have been too long oppressed by the bourgeois inhabitants), and I’m sorry that this didn’t play a larger role.

Valente’s narrative voice is lush, ornate, packed with adjectives and descriptors, and borrows the cadence of the fairy tale. This is usually powerful, but in certain moods and quantities feels oppressive. The voices of her characters are no different. Characters speak in lush, large, sweeping sentences, proverbially, poetically and axiomatically. This fits their role as archetypes and ideals, not as people:

“‘As you swallow the cow’s tongue, think for a moment about how strange and holy that is, to devour the tongue of another. To steal from it all its power to speak, to low at the moon, to call to its calf. To be worthy of such food you must guard your own words carefully, speaking only the wise and clever ones, lest your tongue end up likewise, on the plate of a rich man.’” (65)

“The stallion snorted, and his breath curled in the cold. ‘Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlor game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.’” (148)

“Aleksandra was silent for a long while. The sky got blue and depthless. ‘I seem to remember, in my heart. In a part of my heart locked up behind the farthest, smallest room of my heart. Under that lock is a place with a dirt floor where it is always winter. There I seem to think that someone has died, and no one has helped them. Then I weep so bitterly that horrible flowers grow from my tears.” (304)

There are frequent jumps (temporal and thematic) between sections and between sentences, so that at times, the novel feels non-sequitur. It is cleverer than the reader; it is wiser. It expects the reader to keep up, and I couldn’t always meet the challenge.

Deathless, to me, succeeds as a series of images and fails as a story. It has more in common with the snippets of Akhmatova poetry found throughout: best understood as fragments of some much greater whole.