Fertility without end in the rain forest? Female sexuality as a swamp? It’s an old metaphor in male writing about women: the female body that traps men like quicksand. But it’s also one that women writers have begun using for their own experience. German writer Charlotte Roche called them “wetlands”: the sites of a fecundity and desire that women themselves must learn to navigate. In “State of Wonder,” Ann Patchett’s latest novel, and in “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell, we see women losing and finding themselves in the murky waterways of their own desires.
Ann Patchett’s Amazon adventure story clearly echoes “Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novel in which the Englishman Marlow sails up the Congo River in search of a mad white trader, Mr. Kurtz. But this is not your father’s jungle. For Conrad, the wilderness stands for fear of the other and awareness of one’s own inhumanity. When Patchett makes the two main figures female and the object of their quest a fertility pill, she shifts the story’s ground: “Womb of Darkness,” if you will.
Marina Singh is a mild-mannered medical researcher working for a drug company in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. She is 42, stubborn, solitary, devoted to her profession. Although her father was from India, she grew up in the American Midwest, her mother’s country, and has no desire to leave. In fact, she has “a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth.”
Then, in the middle of a snowstorm, Marina’s boss—an older man with whom she is having a rather colorless affair—comes to her lab to tell her that her research partner is dead. Anders Eckman had traveled to the Amazon rain forest to search for the brilliant, eccentric scientist Dr. Annick Swenson. Now a brief letter from Swenson reports that Eckman has succumbed to a mysterious fever.
Everyone who reads knows what comes next: Marina, who never wanted to go into the rain forest, gets on a plane and heads for Brazil. There she will go on a psychological journey and settle a score with a figure from her past.
Patchett likes to create a slightly magical air in her books, and “State of Wonder,” like her earlier “Bel Canto,” weaves improbable events into a story of compelling beauty. But where “Bel Canto” was a meditation on the power of art, here Patchett uses her cool, elegant sentences to take us on a nightmarish exploration of flesh and the physical world.
The lost researcher in the rain forest, Annick Swenson, was Marina’s mentor in medical school until Marina made the gruesome mistake that ended her promising career as a gynecologist. Now Dr. Swenson is holed up in a village somewhere in Brazil, where she is doing research on a revolutionary medicine. She claims to have found a fountain of youth for female ovaries: a drug that will block or reverse menopause and allow pregnancy at any age.
On the surface, Patchett’s book is about the intense relationship between mentor and student, and for a long time the echoes of Conrad are only distant ones. As Marina works her way slowly from Minnesota to Manaus, we are introduced to a large cast of characters, about whom we learn a great deal—in some cases too much. They include various researchers, a deaf native child who attaches himself to Marina, and two Australian hippies who take her to the Manaus opera house in an homage to Werner Herzog’s film “Fitzcarraldo.” At last, in the heart of the rain forest, Marina encounters Swenson, the novel’s most fascinating creation. She is a complex and arrogant authority figure, both rational scientist and Ur-mother, and in the best mad-scientist tradition she is testing her new medicine on herself.
The further upriver Marina goes, the more she slips the noose of white, masculine, corporate authority. A satellite phone given to her by her boss vanishes along with the rest of her luggage. She discards her antimalarial pills because they give her screaming nightmares of losing her father. By the time she has penetrated the mystery of the Amazonian ovaries she has lost even her clothes and, clad in a native woman’s shift, can pass for a member of the local tribe. Here Patchett seems to be borrowing from “Tarzan” or “Avatar” the idea that “going native” gives the hero special powers.
By the climax, Marina is killing giant snakes and chewing on hallucinogenic tree bark, and “State of Wonder” has stopped being a well-constructed and well-behaved thriller and turned into something more wild altogether. Patchett asks questions about the ethics of science and the nature of power, but there are other interesting images lurking in this book—ones that Patchett, alas, is too nice, or too embarrassed, to address. Childbirth as a horror story, mothers and non-mothers as aliens to one another? These are real nightmares, and they deserve a more thoroughly nightmarish treatment than “State of Wonder,” with its polished sentences and its surprise happy ending, is willing to give them.
Karen Russell, on the other hand, has no fear of the themes she raises. In “Swamplandia!,” the unmapped islands of the Florida Everglades are the site of a teenage girl’s sexual awakening. But this girl has lived all her life in the swamp, and though the territory can be dank and hostile, it feels to her like home.
The Bigtree family live on an island off the coast of Southwest Florida, where they own and operate Swamplandia!, “the Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café in the area.” It’s a second-rate tourist trap with one star attraction: champion alligator wrestler Hilola Bigtree.
Hilola runs the park along with Sam, known as the Chief; and their three teenage children, Kiwi, Osceola, and Ava, who help feed the alligators and train to join their mother in the show. The Bigtrees are fake Indians marketing the swamp experience, but 13-year-old Ava feels far more real than the “drylanders” who visit Swamplandia! “We stayed on the island past dusk; we waited until the moon rode up over the swamp and the only faces in the windows were our own,” she thinks. “I would vanish on the mainland, dry up in that crush of cars and strangers.” To her, the alligators are “creatures of the same mud we had grown up in, (…) our snouty cousins.”
But when Hilola dies of cancer, the park and the family fall apart. Kiwi flees to the mainland, where he takes a job with the rival attraction, a hell-themed amusement park called World of Darkness. Osceola starts believing she can communicate with the dead. And when Osceola disappears, 13-year-old Ava, the narrator of the story, undertakes a mysterious and frightening journey deep into the swamp in hopes of bringing her sister back from the underworld.
For Russell, the swamp serves as the outward representation of all Ava’s tumultuous teenage emotions. But unlike Patchett, she never makes the Everglades an alien place. Instead she shows it for what it is: a landscape of muddy, overgrown islands and twisting channels that is beautiful, inhospitable, and damaged by human intervention. Familiarity and strangeness are many-layered concepts in “Swamplandia!,” and Ava can find her way only by learning to distinguish reality from illusion.
Where Patchett’s novel is stylish in its writing and serious in its ethical concerns, Russell’s feels slight and rough around the edges. But “Swamplandia!” has a few things “State of Wonder” doesn’t: youthful energy, originality, humor (which holds up well in a fine translation by Theo Scholten), and a willingness to confront the dark side of sexuality. What to Patchett is both fascinating and repulsive is to the younger, more optimistic Russell something to wrestle with and win.
Field trip to the Everglades
Ann Patchett (1963) is the author of six novels, most recently “Run” (2007). She won the Orange Prize for “Bel Canto” (2001), about a group of South American terrorists who take an opera singer hostage. While writing “State of Wonder” Patchett spent ten days in the Peruvian jungle, which http://www.npr.org/2011/06/05/136863550/ann-patchett-journeys-to-the-amazon-with-wonder” target=”_blank”>she found both “gorgeous” and “oppressive.” She has no children.
Karen Russell (1981) took her inspiration for “Swamplandia!,” her first novel, in part from field trips she took to the Everglades when she was growing up in Miami. The history of the Everglades—including the 1928 hurricane that killed some 2,500 migrant farm workers, most of them black—also plays a role. The New York Times named “Swamplandia!” one of the ten best books of 2011.
Revised version of review in Trouw, Feb. 25, 2012. Ann Patchett, “State of Wonder” (New York: Harper, 2011). “Staat van verwondering” (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij,. 2012). Karen Russell, “Swamplandia!” (New York: Knopf, 2011; Amsterdam: Atlas Contact, 2012).