Note: While it doesn’t explicitly contain spoilers, this post discusses Swamplandia! in such a way that anyone reading the book would probably be able to infer the ending.

Reading the synopsis for Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! definitely puts one in the mood for magical realism. Between names like Hilola Bigtree and the setting in the Everglades,  it promises the spooky and the supernatural. Words like “haunted” and “bewitching” rise to the surface of the cover blurbs. Diving in, I had high hopes that Swamplandia! would be the long-awaited (in my mind) truly great piece of American magical realism.

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that this is a genre that Americans just don’t do. The matter-of-fact blend of the supernatural and the mundane seems to evolve naturally out of cultures with a long history of belief in magic. Gabriel García Márquez remembers his grandmother telling him stories from her childhood that wove ghosts and spirits seamlessly together with hanging out the laundry. For whatever reason, American mythology has always tended to cleanly separate magic from reality. We are a nation of skeptics, and ghost stories are just that—stories.

Perhaps the one part of the U.S. where this is not entirely the case is in the South, especially in regions of the swampier variety. This made the possibility of Swamplandia! giving the U.S. a respectable entry in the magical realism canon all the more promising. Ultimately, though, Swamplandia! is firmly rooted in the reality of our world. The characters may be a bit more colorful than a novel as disturbingly true-to-life as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, for example, but everything apparently magical ends up having an explanation.

A sense pervades the first half of the novel that even the characters themselves want to be in a novel by García Márquez or Salman Rushdie. They seem to be trying to be nonchalant about the ghosts who are apparently possessing and pledging themselves to daughter Osceola. In fact, a great deal of the novel has to do with wanting to believe. But where Russell’s Everglades differ from Macondo is that in the world of García Márquez, belief doesn’t enter into it. Magic and the supernatural are intrinsic parts of everyday life, and the characters “believe” in these things in the same way they “believe” in the furniture in their house. Ava Bigtree discovers in a tragic way that no matter how much one might want to believe, the only magic is within, and not in the world at large.

Does this say something about American literature? About American culture in general? We do tend to gush about hyper-realist novels and authors like Franzen. Revered masters of American literature like Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote stories with little if any supernatural elements to them. Recent National Book Award winners have dealt with the “restrictive realities of rural poverty,” (Salvage the Bones, 2011), “the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s,” (Let the Great World Spin, 2009), “scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain” (Lord of Misrule, 2010). In contrast,  books with magical or fantasy elements regularly take British prizes. Arguably the three most significant works of fantasy of the 20th century—Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia—were all written by Brits. In fact, one of the most popular fantasy series written by an American, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, has been specifically lauded for its downplaying of magic and focus on political intrigue. Is there something about Americans that just isn’t particularly suited to the supernatural?

In some ways, Swamplandia!‘s ultimate lack of actual magic seems to be hinting at this. Part of the criteria for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is that the book have to do significantly with American life and culture, and perhaps it was this conclusion that resonated with the judges as particularly American. We’ve been raised to always be looking for the man behind the curtain.

This doesn’t mean Swamplandia! isn’t worth reading, of course. Russell has an incredibly promising and original voice that I’m anxious to see develop. I would have been surprised if it had won the Pulitzer, though. As crackling and enjoyable as Russell’s prose is, the book doesn’t seem sufficiently weighty to carry a prize like that. But perhaps there is more to Swamplandia! than meets the eye. It does seem to be coming to a sobering conclusion about Americans and our relationship to magic and fantasy. It’s high time we had what Swamplandia! seemed positioned as—a truly excellent, respected piece of American magical realism.