Entrance to Gatorland, Florida. via wikimedia commons.

Gospel of Anarchy
by Justin Taylor
Harper Perennial, 2011

Swamplandia!
by Karen Russell
Alfred A. Knopf, 2011

It is difficult for writers to separate the stories set in Florida from the state itself. Carl Hiaasen, for one, has made his career on the character of Florida. His humans tend towards stock types: the slimy politician, the reluctant heroine, the wild-eyed, beardy eco-terrorist. This isn’t a dig at Hiassen’s writing; if the characters that populate his books are unremarkable, it’s because Florida itself is his greatest achievement, a place rendered with such care and boldness that the people fade into the background. This mutual implication of history and geography has marked the state known to snickering 7th graders as ‘America’s Wang,’ since Ponce de Leon landed in 1513. Docile and placid enough in the absence of humanity, Florida is unique for the ferocity of its resistance to settlement, and even the battles lost tend to damage people as much as they do nature. Repeated attempts to drain the Everglades, or to re-route water in South Florida, inevitably result in either wildfires or flooding, never the right amount of water. Floridians are somehow never prepared for hurricanes, even though a big one hits at least once a decade. If people elsewhere enjoy relatively amicable relations with the natural landscape, in Florida it is open war.

Gospel of Anarchy, Justin Taylor’s debut novel, smells of summer in Florida. The dank, still heat is all the more oppressive in Gainesville, a landlocked college town where evangelical punks pursue a dubious moral code on the edges of a certain civilization. David, the book’s central figure, introduces Gainesville with an exasperated, knowing irritation:

All the main roads in Gainesville are named for the roads they lead to. Archer, Waldo, Williston, Hawthorne, Newberry. Nobody ever meant for here to be anyplace special. It exists because someone wanted the county seat on the new railroad line, which Newmansville wasn’t. So they founded this place, named for an Indian killer, general Edmund Gaines, and made it the new seat of Alachua County, itself named for the Indians that General Gaines slaughtered. That’s as much as I know about Gainesville.

David’s take on his town is representative: perceptive enough to be disgusted, but without the necessary momentum or direction to defeat the inertia of apathy. Following a breakup with his girlfriend, he drops out of school at the University of Florida and works a mind-numbing call center job. Living in a pre-furnished, corporate-owned apartment complex, he nurses even his Internet porn addiction with a perfunctory lack of enthusiasm. When David takes up with the punks, buying into their creed of free love and romantic anti-capitalist evangelicalism, his motivation is dubious and unmediated. Even up until the moment of his final, shocking transformation, it’s hard to trust Taylor’s faith in his protagonists’ commitment. Does he take his punks’ religiosity and anarchic values seriously, or with a knowing smirk? The resulting atmosphere – of doubt, indifference, and gloom – is unrelenting. Deep in the book, the agnostic Thomas, who is the chief tenant of the punks’ home base, Fishgut, wonders when the revival meetings he puts on began to get so earnest:

“Thomas could, maybe should make a point of being elsewhere when they come over, but then it’s like who the fuck are they to run him out of his own house? Plus sometimes someone brings a guitar, or he gets his cock sucked… When, exactly, during all of this, did the irony begin to dissipate? Was the shift steady, or was there a tipping point?”

I had a similar question; Gospel of Anarchy consistently feels more comfortable with nihilism than with sentiment. It has many characteristics of a typical ‘Florida’ book but these are warped and cynical. There is the requisite outrage against land developers, here tempered by their opponents (like the punks and Jim Stuckins, their tax-cheating, libertarian landlord) not being any more noble or upstanding than the developers themselves. Even the natural backdrop is, contra-Hiaasen, rendered as seedy and as suspect as everyone and everything else:

“Dusk is gone, the bright sky gone to lead. There’s a firefly rambling by the van now, an icky sports drink green he can’t quite believe is natural, pulsing off-on-off, a lazy beacon adrift in smokelight.”

This might be the most foreboding description of a firefly in all of literature. But if Taylor’s Florida is more sullen than most, there remains something uncomfortably beautiful about it. It’s as if by dwelling where meaning fails his characters, Taylor is forcing Florida to speak up and articulate, to talk its own language. Here Katy, the religious leader of the group, reflects on a legend in which an Indian maiden gets captured by the Devil:

“The real reason Katy likes this story isn’t obvious. In fact, she didn’t understand it herself for a long time. The Devil is the key element. At first it seems like a pretty cool Indian legend, and okay so what, but here’s the thing. The story assumes the existence of a classical Christian Devil, with the capacity for action in the world. But the Indians didn’t believe in any devil, much less that one, and so you eventually realize that this isn’t an old Indian legend, it’s a white people’s legend about Indians. And if you extrapolate further, doesn’t it seem like the real ‘moral,’ beyond the just-so story aspect… is that if the Indians had been Christians they might have been able to better resist the black magic of the Christian Devil, and therefore might have gotten their princess back?

Talk about your cultural imperialism; talk about plain old fucked up. And yet there’s something beautiful about it also, sort of running concurrently with the monstrosity. She can’t put her finger on it exactly, but it has to do with ideological miscegenation, how all cultures are just hodgepodges, collages, patch jobs. Try putting it this way: the monstrosity is the beauty.”

There’s no beach in Gospel of Anarchy, no old people, no reptiles. Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, by contrast, is flush : A pit of alligators all named Seth; a swamp-dwelling man clad head to toe in feathers; two garish amusement parks; an aging alligator wrestler living in a nursing home composed entirely of houseboats.

This marvelous book chronicles the struggles of the gator-wrestling Bigtrees to save their eponymous, family-owned theme park/alligator farm after losing their matriarch and star wrestler, Hilola Bigtree, to ovarian cancer. What’s more, a new hell-themed amusement park called The Underworld has opened nearby, featuring high-tech rides, lukewarm soda (it’s Hell!) and a lazy river full of fake blood.

Trying to save the farm from within, Ava, the youngest Bigtree, is equally devoted-to and dependent-on her family’s swampy island. Her brother Kiwi, the eldest son and under-prepared scholar, braves the horrors of the mainland in the hopes of getting a job to pay off Swamplandia!‘s debts. Ava’s sections, sad and harrowing, are nevertheless a loving celebration of Florida’s disappeared wilderness. This is mixed in with the blooming revelation that the Bigtrees, descendants of Midwestern swampland-buying suckers – who dress up as Indians and cling desperately to the roadside tourist trap that gives them their sense of identity – really aren’t all that special. “In fact, I was discovering all sorts of beliefs and skepticisms turning like opposite gears inside me, and little drawers of hopes and fears I had forgotten to clean out,” Ava worries.

If Gospel of Anarchy is marked by a relentless nihilist realism, Swamplandia! gives disenchantment a clearer arc. Ava’s sister Ossie tells a ghost story about a dredgeman named Louis, who becomes enchanted with the Floridian wilderness:

“Louis was often awake until the filmy predawn, listening to the hum of mosquitoes as if even this were something holy. He was in love with everybody, with the heat and the stink and the foul teakettle dredge that had cut a channel so far from his childhood. He was in love with the crushed oyster beds and the uprooted trees. He was smart enough, too, to keep those feelings to himself.”

When Louis finds out his colleagues don’t share his feelings, he is hurt:

“Ultimately, Louis felt an almost romantic embarrassment, listening to the grizzled guys talk — it turned out that the same nights and routes that he recalled as heavenly had been, to the other CCC men, a nightmare.”

Meanwhile, on the mainland, Kiwi finds Florida thoroughly conquered by man, and, in an environment equal parts grotesque and hilarious, endures the same painful realizations. Unacquainted with the social niceties of modern living, Kiwi approaches his new surroundings with the detached focus of an embedded cultural anthropologist; when a co-worker at his new job writes “gay ass ass-fucker” on his locker, he writes the phrase down as something to “dissect in his field notes.”

Kiwi encounters nothing so horrible as south Floridian suburbia, where his terror is funny, and, if you’re from Florida, all too familiar:

“Now that Kiwi had at last made it to a suburb it was easy to want a swamp. What was this fresh hell? The World of Darkness seemed like a cozy and benign place compared to the sprawl of those stucco boxes, these single-family houses. Kiwi saw no coconuts and no creeks. The Pelkises had a Poinciana tree dragging magenta combs over the grass and a bunch of rusting croquet wickets in the yard. Inside, they had a Wurlitzer piano and a mantel covered in what appeared to be hundreds of tiny porcelain cats. The Pelkises’ d’ecor was such a clean and pleasant variation on the Bigtrees’ cabinets of gin and lizards that Kiwi found himself holding tightly to he edge of the Pelkises’ Lysoled table, as if these shiny surfaces were trying to buck him. Instead of a Juggernaut Human Cannon, they had a green Toyota. Instead of a Gator Pit, their backyard had a shrunken plastic house that contained an animate cotton ball that turned out to be a dog.”

Kiwi’s apocalyptic vision of human progress is a common one. This progress, in both Gospel of Anarchy and Swamplandia!, and elsewhere, whether in the form of a rival theme park or plans for a golf course on a bald eagle preserve, is the ultimate enemy. The natural, rural bits of Florida represent its best self; as more humans show up, it becomes safer, banal, devious, and depressing. “The thing down in Florida is you can get in your car and drive by the carnage. See the bulldozers fill in the estuary,” Hiassen has said. “All these folks have had the same experience. Maybe they had their kid in their car and wanted to show something from their own childhood, a pond or a lake, and it was gone. It was a Wal-Mart. There is a unique and unforgettable feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you turn a corner and that place is not there.”

That’s the thing about Florida: in the best scenario, it wouldn’t have people in it. The Florida I loved as a child, the one that I still love as an adult, exists uneasily alongside human beings. There’s a guilt attached to even calling Florida home, because you’re constantly forced to face its prehistoric state: what it was before you came along and spoiled everything. This is why Florida is the resident buffoon, because it still struggles with its own surroundings in a very public way, a way that, in an era of supposed environmental coexistence, seems uncouth.. Florida tells stories because living on the verge of wilderness makes wild things, like humid air and original sin, impossible to ignore.