I want to finally talk about Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, which I read a few weeks ago. This book, remember, was one of three finalists for the fiction Pulitzer this year—one of the few years in Pulitzer history that no fiction prize was awarded. I was particularly interested in reading this one because, while the other two books had surface level or publication related issues that may have prevented them from earning the prize, the only thing standing in the way of this book winning would have been content problems—problems with the book itself.

The short response is I liked the book. My long response, of course, involves a “but”: but I can understand why it didn’t win the Pulitzer.

First, some praise: the story is very compelling; the characters, though quirky to the point of not being believable, are likeable and interesting; and the plot really drives you forward, with some exciting and unexpected turns. I don’t want to give anything away—because I DO strongly recommend you read the book for yourself—but there are some dark and quite painful elements to this book, which is, at its core, the story of how two poor (as in financially) kids from the swamp come to learn what the real world is.

The book is divided into two separate threads: the story of Ava Bigtree, our thirteen-year-old first-person narrator, and that of her seventeen-year-old brother, Kiwi, who runs away to the mainland to get a job in the hopes of sending money home to his family and forestalling the impending foreclosure on their swamp. The book gets off to a plodding start, and my biggest complaint about it is that the first hundred or so pages do little more than establish who these characters are and what their pasts are like. It reminded me of the first hundred or so pages of the much criticized The Girlwith the Dragon Tattoo—which book, for the record, I actually liked. But the first hundred or so pages should have been trimmed. Same here. There’s no reason why these important, establishing details couldn’t have been worked into the story itself, instead of starting with a hundred pages of establishing stuff, then beginning the plot.

I also have problems with the quirkiness of the characters (particularly Ava and Kiwi’s sister, Ossie, who believes she is in contact with the undead). I’ve met a lot of people in my life, and I’ve never met people who are as over-the-top quirky as the characters in some of today’s popular books, movies, and TV shows. I just don’t think that kind of quirkiness is realistic.

And, as many of the reviewers on Amazon mentioned, the writing is very show-offy. Note that show-offy writing is not the same as beautiful writing. Some of the writing is beautiful, but much of it is so overly poetic that I kept being taken out of the story to either A) marvel at what a unique way of saying what she’s trying to say Russell has, or B) read and reread a sentence trying to figure out what the heck it means. Even when it was A, which seems like a good thing, you have to remember I was being pulled out of the story each time. It got tiresome. I couldn’t just get sucked in—isn’t that what we all hope for when we begin reading a novel?

But I want to repeat that I DID like the book. Once the plot really gets going—particularly once Ava’s plot really gets going, which doesn’t happen until around the halfway point of the book—I really cared about what was happening, and I felt moved, saddened, genuinely wounded at certain points in the narrative. I loved the ending, loved the way both Ava and Kiwi (and to a lesser degree, their sister Ossie) have been so irreversibly changed by the events that have taken place. Love the fact that I genuinely believe that Ava, our narrator, has grown up—in a sad, a very sad way—by the end. I also loved some of the imagery, loved the writing itself at points, when it wasn’t too over-the-top, and I do think Russell has a lot of talent; she’s a writer whose name I’ll definitely watch for from this point forward.

But I couldn’t help but compare Swamplandia! to last year’s fiction Pulitzer winner, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I didn’t think A Visit from the Goon Squad was the best book I’d ever read or anything, but it was a good book with a lot of interesting, intricately woven themes. It’s structure was interesting too, and not necessarily in a gimmicky way (like, say, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was good, but the peculiar structure really didn’t add much, so it ended up feeling like a cheap gimmick). Egan is a much better writer than Russell. At least, right now.

Russell, though, is at the very beginning of her career. I agree with Pulitzer fiction judge Michael Cunningham that Swamplandia! is impressive for a first novel, and I have no doubt Russell will just get better and better as she goes along. Russell, by the way, is my age—she’s exactly six months (to the day) younger than me, actually (I looked it up). Her first book came out when she was like 25—the year I entered into my MFA program. She’s already off to a great start in her career, and even if Swamplandia! wasn’t quite good enough to win the Pulitzer, it was a good book, and I won’t be a bit surprised if a Pulitzer is in Russell’s future—just not for this book.

Michael Cunningham, one of the three fiction judges for the Pulitzer Prize this year, wrote a fascinating and insightful two-part article for The New Yorker discussing the judges’ experience selecting three books to send to the Pulitzer committee and responding to the committee’s decision not to award a fiction prize this year. If you haven’t already, read this article. It’s much more interesting and worthwhile than anything I have to say here in my blog. But, if you’ve already read it, I do have some thoughts about why, perhaps, the committee didn’t award the prize this year.

In the article, Cunningham describes the three books the fiction judges selected to send to the committee: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and Karen Russell’s debut novel, Swamplandia! Though Cunningham argued that each of these books contained its own sort of brilliance, in his discussion of them, he did seem to be anticipating the possible objections the committee may have had to each book.

The Pale King was unfinished when David Foster Wallace died. Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch deserves much of the credit for how the book turned out. This fact alone was perhaps problematic to the Pulitzer committee. Should they award the prize to The Pale King, who would really have earned the prize, Wallace or Pietsch? Furthermore, I can understand the committee’s possible hesitance in general at awarding the prize to a novel that was unfinished at the time of the author’s death.

Train Dreams poses its own set of problems. Technically, though sold separately as its own book, it’s not a novel or short story collection but a single novella. Johnson originally published Train Dreams in The Paris Review in 2002. Okay, the fact that it was originally published in a journal ten years ago shouldn’t bar it from serious consideration for the Pulitzer; after all, short story collections are usually filled with stories that were previously published in journals. However, the fact that it’s a novella might have given the committee members pause. The Pulitzer is supposed to go to a complete book. I could see it being argued that Train Dreams shouldn’t count.

The other book the judges selected, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, is the least obviously problematic. Karen Russell completed the book herself and is still alive and thriving, working on her next book (a short story collection, which is scheduled to come out next year), and the book is 400+ pages long. Yet reading Cunningham’s defense of the book kind of made me wonder. Cunningham himself acknowledged that the book has problems, but he felt it was impressive . . . for a debut novel. Should a book that wins the Pulitzer need to be qualified in that way?

I did some sleuthing myself (actually because I was trying to decide whether to read Swamplandia!) and found that, though the book is critically acclaimed, MANY readers feel that it’s little more than a showcase for Russell’s elegant prose. On the sentence level, Amazon review after Amazon review notes, Swamplandia! is breathtaking, but the story falls flat in many, many ways. Most everybody seems to agree that Russell is at the beginning of a bright and exciting career, but this particular book—beautiful though the writing is—is good for a debut novel. (NOTE: I did end up deciding to read Swamplandia! and am in the middle of it right now. I’ll reserve my opinion until the end, but perhaps I’ll post about it once I’ve finished and made up my mind about it.)

Who knows the reasons the committee decided not to award a fiction prize this year? All we can do is speculate. However, based on the three books the fiction judges selected as finalists, I think I can at least understand how this might have happened. Still, like Cunningham argues in his article, not awarding a prize is “shortsighted” and “offensive.” Fiction is selective, Cunningham points out, and had there been three different judges this year, they may have selected three different books as finalists. Had that happened, Cunningham further acknowledges, the committee may have selected one as a winner. But ultimately, the committee could have contacted the fiction judges and asked for additional choices. They didn’t have to not award the prize at all.

But since there’s no undoing what’s been done, we can, instead, take this as a valuable reminder of how little (let’s be honest) these kinds of awards really mean. The three fiction judges feel any of the three books they selected as finalists would have deserved the prize. The committee disagreed. And as it is, the finalists only read 300 of the who knows how many books that were actually published last year. Three different judges may have felt one of the other 300 deserved the prize, while you or I may feel one of the countless books that weren’t even being considered deserved it. For a book to win the Pulitzer, it certainly has to have merit, but to say that any book is the best book of the year is sort of ridiculous. You can’t objectively judge something as subjective as literature.