Two thoughts on Karen Russell’s novel, which as always are riddled with the kinds of quasi-spoilers that you can’t properly discuss a book without:
1) So we have a family of charming modern-day gator wrestlers running a failing amusement park on their own private island off the coast of Florida. Beautiful concept. As their business dwindles, every member of the family strikes out on their own fanciful voyage — one into communing with the dead, two others for different careers on the mainland (to spite each other), while the youngest stays behind, the only child left really invested in preserving their home the way it’s always been.
In the last third of the book, Russell comes so close, so close to a thematic revelation, one that seems so clear and imperative and impressive the moment its possibility comes into view, before backing away to the safety of her charming world and themes. We get there by following each character abandoning the park in their own way throughout the novel, and each strikes one as a little self-absorbed, their expansive plots a bit indulgent and somehow beside the point, since our hearts and our focus are always with the youngest child on the island. Vast sections following these characters feel a little strained and aimless until tragedy finally strikes in the final third, suddenly and actually shockingly, recontextualizing many the fanciful elements of the novel into something far more grim. And at that moment, that grim and sudden recontextualization is the most emotionally powerful thing the novel has offered. It appears poised on a thematic shift that condemns each neglectful character out on their fanciful, self-absorbed voyages — that condemns the identity of the family itself by extension — and almost seems ready to marry its form with its substance in a fascinating way that rewards the reader for actually feeling annoyed with all the long asides into ghost stories and the trials of minimum wage work on the mainland — seeing as each of them, in a sense, have represented the blindness of the family towards the most vulnerable among them, who is left alone and desperate without them when a stranger comes to knock. There is a moment when the tone of the book is beckoned to flip on its head, and condemn everyone and their collective sense of identity, the romance of their self-preoccupations, and it was a book I was unexpectedly thrilled to find there, waiting and patiently assembling its case.
And that version of the book holds for just a moment, before we walk it all back, quickly and without apology. Characters are given the chance to save the day, and they do; reconciliations are efficiently achieved; no one is much accused, much less condemned; the romance of the family with its idea of itself is tattered, but intact, as they begin new lives together on the mainland, diminished but proud.
Leaving that whole other, devastating book lurking out there in the swamp. Oh so pregnant with what could have been.
2) Setting: There are books that offer a setting that feels like a character. There are books where setting helps identify the characters. There are books where characters help shape their settings. But I don’t know that I have ever (or possibly will ever) read a book where setting is so profoundly developed along all three of these dimensions. An island, physically and culturally removed from the world. Where each character’s life’s work is set out for them over generations, their family gator-taming circus act. Where the characters all work to make the show and the theme of the park an extension of their self-conceived family identity — a gift shop of family artifacts and tchotchkes with their faces emblazoned on them, a personal mythology on sale that is half-invented for the tourists, half-invented for themselves. The island is not just a character, it is limitedly coextensive with all the characters, and they cannot exist outside of it nor it outside of them. It is a fascinating and unique device that I have a hard time imagining how one would ever fashion its equal in terms of the utterly inextricable symbiosis between person with place.