Dark Corners in "Swamplandia!"

Karen Russell’s second book “Swamplandia!” is a novel of the south, set deep in the swampy groves of Florida. The lush plant life and entangled landmasses permeate the book’s atmosphere and provide a climate not often explored in fiction or even by non-fictional people. The story is about children and the timbre of the tale is dark, an effect deepened by the innocence of the children’s voices.

“Swamplandia!” is full of oddities. The title refers to the amusement park/tourist attraction located off the mainland run by the Bigtree family. The Bigtrees are not an ounce Indian but they don the garb and raise alligators, or Seths as they call them, and impress their audiences with death defying performances. Ava, our primary narrator, is the third generation of the Bigtree dynasty and a witness to its collapse. She is the youngest member of the alligator wrestling family, baby sister to her brother Kiwi and sister Ossie.

Their mother dies at the outset of the novel and Ava doesn't quite know how to deal with the fact that it was cancer that killed her, though she defied death regularly during her alligator swims. Her mother’s tragic but mundane demise disappoints the tourists and without the star of the most popular attraction, the audience to dwindles.

The appeal of the Bigtree theme park is further diminished by the establishment of the sinister World of Darkness on the mainland. The new park is host to a vast array of disturbing rides and the slick, manufactured nature of the entertainment is something Chief Bigtree looks down on. But Ava’s father, while a safe presence, has no grasp of how to care for his children and when Kiwi runs away to the mainland to help bail out the family, the Chief leaves Ossie and Ava on their own soon after.

The three children are displaced by the loss of their mother and they take very different tacks to manage the situation. Their attempts to embrace and escape their legacy are central to the story and tainted by darkness.

Ossie is dreamy, the middle sister. In the wake of her mother’s death she begins to obsess over, and eventually consort with, ghosts. Thick in the margins of adolescence, Ossie becomes enamored with a young dredgeman, Louis, who died decades before she was born. Ava listens to her sister’s recitation of Louis’s tale (perhaps the best section of the novel) and is swept up in the romance but never believes the way Ossie does, and can’t discern the limits of her sister’s imagination.

When Ossie disappears into the everglades, Ava begins her own odyssey to find her. Her guide is a sinister, mystical guy called Bird Man, who claims he can lead her to the underworld and retrieve the sister she has lost. Russell has asked us to suspend our disbelief to minor degrees throughout the book and by this point we want to trust in the Bird Man as much as Ava, even though our better judgment tells us to be wary.

Parallel to Ava’s adventures through the slippery waterways, is Kiwi’s exposure to mainland culture. The bright, homeschooled boy is used to being the star of his surroundings and is suddenly thrust in the judgmental mediocrity of teenage life.
Kiwi is dealt the surprise of different uncertainties, neither more nor less prickly than Ossie and Ava’s precarious involvements.

Russell constructs a strange world for her protagonists and deftly guides the reader around its contours. The distinction between fantasy and reality is tenuous in the worlds of the Bigtree children and Russell expertly reminds us of the appealing possibilities that accompany this fluidity as well as the dangers.

The Continuous Pleasure of "Just Kids"

The 2010 winner of the National Book Award is a modest tome brimming with charm. Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” is a memoir of love. It is a love story written for New York and for Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith tells her tale without frills and her matter-of-fact delivery makes her brushes with celebrity more compelling and her relationship with Mapplethorpe incredibly affecting. Her path to success feels almost accidental and incites a certainly misplaced nostalgia for the trials of the past. Smith manages to create a Neverland out of New York, despite the fact that this was actually her life and the challenges she overcame were quite real.

Smith's prose is imbued with a grounded ingenuity. She arrives in NY after a little bit of college, giving a child up to adoptive parents, and with an interest in poetry and art. She not so marches as glides into the New York of '67, the summer Coltrane dies, as she marks it.

Her memories of New York are stippled with gravestones. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and finally, Robert Mapplethorpe. The way she depicts the times, the New York of these artists was roiling with creative opportunity. They lived beneath the surface and made their worlds the center of the universe.

Patti meets Robert by chance on a hot day in Brooklyn. Their second and third encounters are as accidental as the first, but they are the beginning of an enduring love affair and, more importantly, a relationship between artist and muse.

The cursory knowledge I had of Mapplethorpe before this book was of his later photographs. It is impossible to forget his images of nudity and bondage once you have seen them. If the subject matter doesn’t appeal, the beauty of his execution does. His photographs suggest a sexual preference; an assumption that is easily made and not quite accurate.

Patti walks alongside Robert as his sexuality burgeons and changes. His metamorphosis is terrain she does not play a part in and yet her embrace is complete. “Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art,” she writes. “He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity and enviable nobility. Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace.” Smith’s rendering of Mapplethorpe’s personal expansion is incredibly gentle and a tribute to their bond as well as to her patience and desire to understand him.

Reading about the New York of 40 years ago today is delicious. The cost of living makes your mouth water and the casual encounters Smith has with artistic legends are simple and savory. Smith blossoms separately from Mapplethorpe, but their work was in constant conversation with the other’s. Smith lists toward the light, while Mapplethorpe probes at the darkness. "Just Kids" is in many ways a work of poetry and though it falters at times in its center, its artistry and emotion make it an overwhelming success.

The morning I took “Just Kids” out of my purse, I dined on eggs in the West Village. Looking up after ordering, I saw a woman with a cappuccino in front of her, and a notebook. She had a pen on the table but was reading from the book and smiling from time to time. The restaurant was tiny and I didn’t want to invade her privacy, but I whispered to my companions, “It’s her! It’s Patti Smith!” The serendipity of the moment felt like a slice of the old New York she knew. The coincidence of the sighting was a moment of urban grace, which wrapped us up in the world she wrote of.

"Freedom" and its Disappointments

I almost hate to add my voice to cacophony surrounding Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.” For weeks after its publication you could barely get three paragraphs into an arbitrary New York Times article without mention of the book.

The wild success of Franzen's latest suburban fiction is baffling to me. I read “The Corrections” in high school and abhorred the characters so intensely that I have no recollection of the novel beyond my dislike. The lack of redemption and personal depth in each cranky, self-involved figure seemed a belittlement of their live, equally flawed, counterparts. I read “Freedom” hoping the extra years would open my eyes to the strengths of the author’s oeuvre and perceptions.

I did like “Freedom” more than “The Corrections,” which is like saying I like a vicious hangover more than food poisoning. “Freedom” is an easy read. The characters are less despicable than those found in “The Corrections,” but ultimately every one comes up with a less than full deck of humanity.

Walter and Patty Berglund are surburbanites, the harbingers of gentrification in a Minnesota neighborhood. On the surface they are a Pleasantville unit of contentment, which contributes to their neighbors' enjoyment when the family begins to implode. It should come as no surprise that the pages are full of infidelity, superiority complexes, and helicopter mothering.

The conceit of the characters in “Freedom” is that they appear to be fully realized, complex figures. Franzen does not shy away from exhibiting the flaws of his characters' "human natures" and at first glance this reads as depth. But as my uncle noted in a correspondence about the text, we never really know, and thus don’t like, any of the characters.

The majority of the Berglunds actions are driven by anger, revenge, repression, etc, and are held up as prototypes of middle-class normality. I agree that people are inherently self-interested, but not that they are exclusively, constantly so.

Perhaps my life has been unfairly filled with generous people. But I come from a world of comfort and privilege and nothing I've encountered resembles the selfish, bad behavior of “Freedom.” I agree with Franzen that our boundless range of opportunity has provided us with more reasons, not fewer, to be disappointed by our circumstances. I agree that humans are flawed, egocentric and prone to making mistakes. What infuriates me about Franzen's work is that he creates caricatures and proceeds to endow them with so much history, a full 562 pages, that we are tricked into believing they are three-dimensional.

Recently, a friend asked me what was wrong with reading about characters you don’t like. Perhaps it’s a blind spot of mine, but my feeling is: Why bother? Which is not to say that I dismiss literary figures based on whether or not I would take them to dinner or agree with their morals. There is humanity in reprehensible characters, think of Humbert Humbert, and when that humanity is accessed the reader can identify or reflect upon similar vulnerabilities, moral or emotional, in herself.

Franzen’s characters made me want to smack them over the heads for being so self-consumed. They are in a state of paralysis, unable or unwilling to adjust their circumstances. There is a bit of silver lining at the end, but at that point I couldn't forgive them and just wanted to forget.

"Cleopatra: A Life" is a Chance to Enjoy the Enduring Wiles of the Egyptian Queen

“She really was impressive, wasn’t she,” said my great-aunt Phoebe over the soup. We were discussing our mutual fascination with Stacy Schiff’s biography “Cleopatra: A Life.” Aunt Phoebe’s sparkling eyes brightened talking about the victories of the queen. Although a figure infamous for her sexual allure, Schiff separates the strength of the woman from the strength of her notorious legacy. The result is a sumptuous depiction of the era, with a discerning eye turned toward the biases of the time.

The tumultuous world of Cleopatra's Egypt is easily accessible on the arm of Schiff. Her extensive research puts her at ease in her subject's world and gives her the ability to enthrall those who are unfamiliar with its terrain. Schiff deftly organizes the clutter of history and hearsay and she brushes the cobwebs off of intrigues 2,000 years old.

The name Cleopatra is tossed around with such frequency that one imagines one knows her entire story. Her seduction of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, her venomous suicide, her deadly allure. Cleopatra's name is practically synonymous with devastating beauty. The primary point that Schiff makes about the queen is that we have virtually no idea what she looked like. The exquisite cover of the book shows the arch of a woman's neck, her face turned away. Cleopatra was a woman who always held something back, making her all the more dangerous and powerful.

It is difficult to trust the descriptions we do have of the queen and its necessary to examine the sources. Notably, no one was able to mention her beauty without also elaborating on her intelligence. In an early biography of Marc Antony by Plutarch, Cleopatra dominates more than have the narrative. Schiff is mindful of the fact that people writing about Cleopatra wrote a hundred years after her death, or more. Inevitably they were men. Cleopatra’s accomplishments were extensive, (presiding as an unmarried queen over an enormous empire, enlisting the help of Rome in the face of a siege, carrying the children of two Caesars) and it is unsurprising that the commentary about her success is biting.

Schiff pokes fun at the attitudes of the time, and indeed some details inspire frank amazement. Members of the Ptolemy clan routinely married uncles, mothers and daughters. Cleopatra was likely the daughter of a brother and sister. The family was also known for brutally murdering each other in order to achieve the throne. Amusingly the Greek language was considered one of "low morals, the dialect of sex manuals, a language 'with fingers of its own.' The Greeks covered all bases, noted a later scholar, ‘including some I should not care to explain in class.'"

Schiff educates us on the customs of the times, and describes the opulent approach of the queen that it becomes impossible not to get lost in her world. The evidence shows that Cleopatra was educated in the same manner as Julius Caesar and that their personalities were uncommonly alike, as was their desire to rule their empires.

Throughout the book Schiff debunks a few myths. An asp undoubtedly did not strike the queen in the breast, despite the poetry of the image. For all the accusations of Cleopatra being a skilled and wanton seductress, she was a virgin when she became Caesar's lover and Marc Antony may have been the only other. There are moments of repetition in the tome, but by and large the information, based on thorough research and clever guesswork, is a spectacularly engaging biography.

What with all the conjecture around the infamous temptress, what remains is Cleopatra's indomitable wit and her ability to shape the world around her despite her gender. Whatever the whispering tongues of history have said or will say, she lived her life as she chose to, no small feat.

Glamour drowns insight in "Why Not Say What Happened?"

The world of the have-a-lots is intrinsically appealing to outsiders and insiders. Glamour and power bounce from the gilded facades of the rich, famous and infamous, and we might just catch a ray; a secondary glow seems better than none. We can’t help at least glancing through the tabloids to read about the latest scandal and to get a glimpse of someone’s tumble or rise. Ivana Lowell’s memoir “Why Not Say What Happened?” plays directly into our eager appetites for the lavish and sensational. A descendant of the wealthy Guinness family, she is also the stepdaughter of the American poet Robert Lowell. The lure for the reader is both the wealth and the brilliance of the players.

The memoir opens with the death of the author’s mother, Lady Caroline Blackwood, wife of Lucien Freud and Robert Lowell. Whisked away from mourning in order to lunch with a friend of Caroline’s, Lowell finds herself forced to question her paternity. Her dining partner suggests, coyly, that by now Lowell knows that she has a different father than her sisters. Lowell is startled and this quandary is meant to be a driving force behind the book. But Israel Citkowitz, who Lowell believed to be her father for thirty odd years, died when she was a child, and her most vivid memories of a father figure are of Robert Lowell himself, who chronologically cannot be her father. Because Lowell's sense of paternity is already benignly disjointed one wonders if the mystery needs to be solved.

Lowell speeds through her narrative by illustrating anecdotes of splendid wealth, whimsical indulgences, and a veritable menagerie of names worth mentioning. Her grandmother Maureen is portrayed as something of a tyrannical social climber, and her mother's moods sway in tandem with her inebriation. Maureen touts the queen mother as among her closest friends, and is only saved from the “family problem” of alcoholism by fatally embarrassing herself in front of the royals and swearing off liquor. Neither Lowell nor her mother escape so easily.

The second thread of the memoir is the author’s struggle with alcohol. Lowell tells us that she has gone to rehab many times, occupying those of both a sparse and luxurious nature. She trots through them at unspecified points in her life and mentions them so lightly it is difficult to discern if she takes them seriously. It is even harder to know if she’s close to conquering her alcoholism or interested in doing so, and your heart goes out to her daughter Daisy, who is a glimmering apparition of hope in her mother’s narrative.

For all of the glamorous hullabaloo Lowell kicks up, there is very little revealed about the depth of either her or her mother’s struggle with alcohol; nor are any of the author’s relationships delineated with concrete particulars or insight. I understand the delicacy of family and the sacred nature of its history. Bringing the public into family secrets is a tricky business. But if you are going to write about it, you have to peel back all the layers. Otherwise the result is not worth even a modicum of the discomfort it will inevitably cause.

Robert Lowell is little more than a benevolent, phantom presence in the narrative and it is disappointing to find his complexities so easily dismissed. The major matriarchal figures in Ivana Lowell’s life are described with an awareness of their venom but without any real exploration of their truths or the consequences. Perhaps this stems from a reluctance to accuse or, merely, to find fault, but Lowell’s inability to truly examine her predecessors makes it impossible for her to incorporate their lessons into her understanding of herself. As a result, not even the reader learns anything of note.

Imperfections become serious flaws in Tom Rachman's novel

The life and death of a small newspaper is the focus of Tom Rachman’s first novel The Imperfectionists. A wealthy businessman decides to start an international English-language paper in Rome. As its custodians, he installs a married couple, Betty and Leo. It is evident that he and Betty have history. The reader assumes he has another motive.

Rachman has laid out his book so that half the chapters read like short stories. Each of these chapters contains a new character and is prefaced by a somewhat sensationalist headline. The paper has been around for fifty years by this time, and is foundering. The other chapters focus on the early years when Betty and Leo were at the helm. Ott makes infrequent, mysterious appearances and one is meant to wonder what it’s all about.

Rachman’s writing is quick and engaging. The dialogue runs smoothly and reveals quantities about the speaker. The ostensible link between characters is the newspaper, but with each additional character that connection grows deeper and more complex. Loneliness emanates from these people, as do misplaced ambitions and resignation.

The title foreshadows flaws in the characters personalities. And one by one they exhibit quite a range. They are bitterly restrictive, selfish, rich, pathetic, cruel. Rachman fails to explore the depths of these characteristics, and an attribute that might have been one facet of a personality, becomes its bulk.

Little is done to evoke either the Rome of fifty years previous or its current incarnation. The newspaper’s staff is, almost across the board, removed from the Italian life. Rachman’s decision to elide the complexities of where his characters are, is a further shortcoming of the novel.

The male figures in the novel are constructed with a much steadier hand. The women wither beneath their imperfections. Hardy, the first woman introduced, is filled with neuroses: body image, self-esteem, daddy issues. Her eating disorder is an integral part of who she has become and, as is so often the case in fiction, it is used as a casual detail. Rachman joins a legion of male and female authors who slip in anorexia or bulimia as an aside. The lack of comprehension is evident in the omission of serious examination.

I had tired of the cast by the end and was surprised to find myself entranced by an airplane tryst. The location is wonderfully tantalizing for its impermanence and its suggestion of adventure. Abby Pinnola is the only woman who is pitch perfect. Crotchety and resigned to the 11-hour flight, she is humanized by her recently fired co-worker, Dave. The two of them have experienced the disappointment of Italy. Italians spend their lives as a large family, by blood or bond, and neither was able to find a niche. The delightful scene that emerged from accidental proximity threatened to redeem if not salvage the novel. The eventual dissolution into petty revenge enraged me.

While I was initially enchanted by the light accessibility of Rachman’s prose, the casual, cruel nature of the his characters imperfections wore me out.

No punches pulled for "The Surrendered"

The three protagonists of Chang-Rae Lee’s novel The Surrendered are marked by fatalities and tragedy. The depth of the damage they experience appears infinite, and yet all three continue to stay afloat, if not move forward.

June is a dutiful daughter of eleven when her family is ensnared in the brutality of the Korean War. After weeks of starvation on the road with her family, she is the only one who remains of her parents and four siblings. Their deaths are unceremonious; she can do nothing but continue. June survives, but the war marks her indelibly. As the violence peters out, she encounters an American soldier on the road and, despite the reader’s grim expectations, he does nothing but lead her to a home for the other children who have lost their pasts to the war. But the child who was June has vanished, she has grown cruel and withdrawn with her peers and there is little hope of her adoption.

The American soldier is Hector. He is a man who possesses an almost supernatural ability to cheat destruction. He wins any drinking contest because alcohol has no discernible effect on him and the many physical, brutal fights he engages in reward him with wounds that heal with absurd, and for him, frustrating, rapidity. After the death of his father, Hector leaps at the chance to join the army, finding himself in the inferno of Korea, where he continuously confronts horrors and dead bodies with a frightening ease.

The third protagonist is Sylvie. She is the wife of the Reverend Tanner and together they run orphanage where Hector and June wind up. Sylvie has enough terrors and darkness of her own without the lurking shadows of the war in Korea. The only child of missionaries, her family was caught in Manchuria during the conflict between the Japanese and the Chinese and her very existence cost others their lives.

These three intricately crafted characters are a trio of the ravished. When their paths entwine, the meetings do not remedy the damage of their pasts. Lee lays out his story in swatches and it is with eagerness, but bated breath, that the reader awaits the union of the pieces.

Lee’s descriptions are not vociferously brutal, but the circumstances he describes make your heart pound. The stories are factual and soul splitting. Need is central to these characters’ experiences and the needs of the body are particularly felt. The corporeal desires range from food, to release, to sex. Not one of Lee’s characters is whole and the manners in which they attempt to satiate their need are hardly healing.

Lee treats the mundane details of his story with the same weight as the injustices of war, never putting one above the other in the hierarchy of pain. But the difference is obvious and the author's ability not to stress the point intensifies the poignancy of the discrepancies.

The hand of the author is not invisible in this novel. Sometimes his language ranges obtusely outside the colloquial usage, and at other moments his odd choices are a delicious stamp of authorship. The moments when Lee emerges from the text suggests a certain discomfort with the comforts he so briefly allows his characters. Life is ruthless with them; their suffering does not make them heroes, nor does it make them exempt from further pain.