Choose Your Own Adventure

Trailblazers, thrill-seekers and alligator wrestlers lead readers into uncharted territory.

by Justin Bauer

For a book about a lost polar expedition, Amy Sackville's The Still Point (Counterpoint, Jan. 1) contains very little in the way of pulse-pounding action. She does this deliberately, choosing texture over ease. After all, adventure stories provide easy structure. Whether a polar expedition or a pioneer survey or a trek through the unmapped Everglades, familiar trajectories of adversity and conquest supply the deep satisfaction that comes from fulfilled expectations, or useful conventions to rebel against.

Sackville's quiet, prim novel rebels. The fictional Edward Mackley's expedition to the North Pole — the still point of the title — gets unwrapped by great-niece Julia during a sticky-hot day. Time, the reserve of his journals, and especially the family mythology shaped and passed down by the wife who waited a half-century for his return impose still more distance between subject and researcher. But the imprint of the past on Julia and husband Simon's present, where the bulk of Sackville's controlled and precise Woolfishness is concentrated, shows clearly, and the conflict between vague legend and knotty family history is amplified by the textured contrast between stifling summer nights and ice-cold midnight sun.

The Still Point 's family myths work like our national ones, like the frontier ideal that stunts and channels the present of Jonathan Evison's West of Here (Algonquin, Feb. 15). Both novels share surface similarities, with West of Here featuring a similar expedition to the interior of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, played much straighter. Evison ropes together all of his plots — and there are a good half-dozen — with resonances between past and present, heroic settlers' footsteps prefiguring the much-diminished fumblings of their descendents.

The quick swings between characters, plots and even styles Evison manages are impressive: He moves seamlessly from an ex-con's Atlas tattoo that "looked like an ice cream cone with feet" to a school of salmon forming "a river running inside the river, a leaping, wriggling ribbon of life." That this shift only occurs in one direction — from a heroic past, heedless of consequences, into a tawdry, impoverished present hoping for second chances — also shows an easy pessimism about the romance of capitalism, while remaining nostalgic for its heedless virility.

For all of Evison's craft, there's a reason that nostalgia seems easy; it's an adolescent disenchantment, moving from a child's sense of adventure to the restrictions of adulthood. Spread over a century, it becomes cynical; viewed from the inside — as anyone who's made it through adolescence knows — it's wrenching. Capturing this wrench, the disenchantment without the softening nostalgia, is one of the best things Karen Russell does in Swamplandia! (Knopf, Feb. 1).

At 13, Ava Bigtree's world is magical, or at least outlandish: She comes from a family of alligator wrestlers, proprietors of Swamplandia!, an Everglades amusement park falling into insolvency after her mother's death. Her sister Ossie romances ghosts, "dating" the spirits of dead boys she says possess her; her brother Kiwi runs away from home, hoping to go to school but winding up mopping floors at the World of Darkness, a competing hell-themed park.

The familial and financial catastrophes that divide the Bigtree family send Kiwi and Ava on separate but parallel adventures. Kiwi, out of the swamp, struggles to accommodate the suburban normalcy he wants; Ava moves deeper into superstition — and deeper into the swamp. By the time, near the end of the book, that both Kiwi and Ava confront the legend of swamp witch Mama Weeds, independently and with different degrees of literalness, the distance that each has traveled becomes shockingly clear; runaway Kiwi "saw that there were witches everywhere in the world. Witches lining up for free grocery bags of battered tuna cans and half-rotted carrots at the downtown Loomis Army of Mercy. At the bus station, witches telling spells to walls. Only the luckiest ones got to live inside stories."

This is the double-edged luck that Russell's characters have; it's also a major reason for Swamplandia! 's propulsive grip. Her characters do more than act or choose; their perspectives evolve, and the progress of adventure in their world becomes more than an accessory, a counterpoint or a precursor to something else the author wants to emphasize, but instead acts as the point and the vehicle for their stories. The result is a novel that is more than just primly beautiful or impressively encyclopedic, but one that's strong and sad with the satisfaction of an adventure completed.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

Justin Bauer is the Indiana Jones of books. His column, Shelf Life, runs monthly in City Paper's A&E section.