Sunshine States

Bard Fictionistas Edie Meidav and Karen Russell Go Coastal

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, June 28, 2011

What is it about the edge of a continent? Though Bard Fiction Prize winners Karen Russell and Edie Meidav currently live on the temperate banks of the Hudson, their new novels gleefully plunge into coastal extremities.

Russell’s Swamplandia! (Knopf, 2011) unfolds in the hummocky swamps of Florida’s 10,000 Islands. Meidav’s Lola, California (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) follows its two title characters—best friends nicknamed after a Kinks lyric—from a pitch-perfect Berkeley to Europe, New York, and back to their home state’s cracked paradise.

The two writers are a study in contrasts. Fair-haired and willowy, Meidav unfurls her formidable intellect in elegant, literary prose. Russell is dark and petite, with a mischievous grin and a penchant for quirky phrases that stick in the mind like burs. The Miami native recalls her first Annandale winter, “I didn’t realize you have to be a paleontologist of your car, hacking it out of layers of snow.”

Russell arrives late for an author event at the Elmendorph Inn, after a breathless sprint from the Red Hook Inn, where she parked by mistake. “I’ve truly never been happier to arrive at a reading,” she pants. “I guess that’s the payoff for terror: elation.” She introduces Swamplandia!, “It’s about a family of alligator wrestlers. My real family wants to make sure I tell people it’s not a memoir. My sister is very sane; she dates living people. And my brother is not a virginal bookworm nerd.” Nor is her father Chief Bigtree, head of a mythical tribe consisting entirely of his immediate family.

“Chief Bigtree is a classic American optimist, trying to make a private world outside the loop of time, to protect his loved ones from the noise of the larger culture. The Bigtrees live 40 miles off the grid, but all his kids go on private journeys to hell,” Russell says. Her narrative alternates between Ava Bigtree’s desperate search for her ghost-bride sister and her brother’s hilarious, painful foray into mainland adolescence. Russell is also stalking a larger story about a family adrift in the wake of the mother’s death; her themes ripple outward to the state of Florida, in both senses.

“Swamplandia! is very much about the ecological devastation of the Everglades,” she explains. “It was this exquisitely delicate system of controls that was totally natural and worked for thousands of years. The Corps of Engineers came in and destroyed it in one generation by building canals and levees.” She calls her book “a nostalgia project. My grandfather would take us into the swamp and tell these amazing stories about a place that didn’t exist anymore.”