Karen Russell (1) (1981–)

Back in my totally middle class 70's childhood, my family used to go camping down in Florida and in various other places where strange roadside attractions loomed. I always wondered about the families that ran those reptile zoos or collections of plaster dinosaurs or bizarre ersatz "Native American" teepee huts. My dad was always too cheap to take us to any of the really good attractions, like Disney world or 6 Flags or anything like that, so our days were spent in places where a disenchanted alligator would yawn at us and we would look, frantically, in the gifte shoppes in the hope of finding something to make our visits worthwhile. Of course, my dad would never buy us anything that we asked for, so most of the time was spent in trying to indicate wants without actually saying them, but that's another story.
Swamplandia is a totally perfect rendition of what I always imagined those families to be like. I wallowed in this book. I felt the mosquitoes, the heat, the despair of living on not enough money and trying to be a star. I could see the curling-up posters on the wall, the postcards that were printed slightly off so the red poked out from behind the picture a bit.
It's not a really cheerful book. Things go bad and then things get worse and so on, but the characters seem to just take most of it in stride and succeed in their own way, nonetheless. One doesn't get the same emotional drenching as one would, say, in a Joy Fielding novel about the same situation. The floating along-ness goes with the pace of the book. Emotions aren't plumbed to their very depths - when something really bad happens, it's just described, and we move on. It's not less horrible for that - it instead speaks to the expectations of this family. They survive because they don't hope for better. As Mary Engelbreit's brightly cheerful poster says, "Life is just so daily!" And yet. Despite their calmness, I found myself rooting for the whole family throughout the book, wishing them well. Heck, I'd go to Swamplandia myself, just to see the swimming act...… (mer)

This is Karen Russell's third short story collection, and it's to the credit of the first two that I bought and read this one. Of the eight stories in this collection, three are pretty easy to find online, and before purchasing this book, I probably would have said that I didn't like any of them.
This collection, I think, is a continuation of a trend in Russell's work away from the pseudo-ironic, faux-cheerful roadside attraction style of her first collection and into work that's more easily categorizable. It's not necessarily that all of these stories are easily fitted into "genre" stories and "literary" stories, but I feel like they're moving in that direction—there's less of a fusion between the fantastic and the mundane, the magical elements are pushed too far into the forefront or they recede, like an afterthought, behind the main "point" of the story, which is often unrelated. And the stories that do strike a good balance (The Bad Graft, Black Corfu) still don't feel very "particular", I don't think I would pick them out of a line up as "Karen Russell stories". They feel like they could've been written by anyone, at least stylistically.
Ok, here's a little review of each story.
"The Prospectors": This was one of my least favorite stories here, a fairly straight up ghost story set during the Great Depression. I'm not a fan of historical fiction in general and though I think Russell generally pulls it off successfully, here it felt unnecessary and didn't add anything.
"The Bad Graft": I got halfway through this one before I realized that I had, in fact, read it before. It's easily the best story in this collection, and it's available online, so I won't say any more about it.
"Bog Girl": Another one I've read before. I don't love it, and it didn't leave me with strong impressions, but the mother/son relationship felt real and interesting.
"Madame Bovary's Greyhound": I haven't read Madame Bovary, so I think most of this went over my head, but it did kind of make me want to read Madame Bovary, which is impressive. As with Bog Girl, the relationships were more interesting than the "plot", to the extent a plot existed.
"The Tornado Auction": This feels the most in line with Russell's early work, though it does feel a little thin. I didn't get much insight into the character until more than halfway through the story, which made it feel both overly long and kind of rushed. I like this one on paper, but it didn't do it for me.
"Black Corfu": Another historical piece, though I quite liked it this time. The style felt deliberate and the characters well-formed. Good coherence between plot, characters, and setting. I'm not sure it's worth it to buy this book on the strength of this story alone, but it definitely tips the scales in that direction.
"The Gondoliers": I don't think I can fairly say whether this is good or bad. It's pretty straight dystopian scifi, which does less than nothing for me, but might be enjoyable to people who are into that.
"Orange World": Really unfortunately not about a world of orange at all. This is the devil breastfeeding story I've heard so much about, and it's good for a few laughs, but the premise is probably stronger than the story itself, which makes it an appropriate title story for this collection.… (mer)

In this very short novel (or perhaps it's a novella?), a plague of insomnia has been sweeping the world, one that can only be treated by donations of sleep from others, and we watch a woman whose job it is to recruit these donations struggling with the ethics of her job and her approach to it.

Which makes this sound like an interesting but fairly straightforward sort of science fiction story. It's not. It's odd, hard to get a handle on, and, perhaps fittingly, rather dreamlike. Aspects of it feel deeply realistic, and others fantastic or almost mystical. The writing is a bit strange, too, giving the impression that the writer was happy to just throw all kinds of weird descriptions and metaphors at everything to see what stuck, with some results that are breathtakingly perfect and others that are borderline nonsensical. In a different sort of work, I might criticize that. In this one... maybe it works.

Thematically, it feels like it could, perhaps even should, be saying something simple and clear, but the more I try to draw one-to-one comparisons with obviously relevant real-life scenarios, the more I find my brain slipping around and getting lost in complexity and metaphor. Whatever I might make of it, I will say that it resonates strongly with issues about disease and treatment, capitalism and exploitation, generosity and greed, privacy and intimacy.… (mer)