St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, by Karen Russell, offers a dystopic surrealism in the vein of Carol Emshwiller and George Saunders. Here, the dark psychic realities of growing up and incorporating oneself into the world are juxtaposed with bleak glimpses of what that reality looks like. Most critics have praised Russell’s grasp of the inter-personal dynamics, the tension in the home, the small tragedies that make up daily life. While that’s all true, that’s not what’s particularly compelling about them. The book doesn’t get credit for its larger scope, one that goes beyond the Floridian swamp country in which most of the stories take place. 

Taken together, the ten pieces offer a dark American history, one of exploitation, industrialism, and a cannibalistic appetite for land. The tension that ties the stories together is one of nature versus culture, or running wild versus captivity. Swamps are turned into amusement parks; alligators are now doomed wrestling partners; gorillas are made to ice skate in a simulated blizzard in the middle of the tropics.  In “The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime,” the narrator falls in with the proverbial bad seeds, a baby-thug named Raffy and “his bitch.” They steal beer and abuse the mentally handicapped, but these are all just half-hearted time wasters. Raffy’s real plan is to manipulate hatchling turtles away from the ocean and onto the beach, where they’ll die.  This is more than just a kid on his way to becoming some sort of serial killer, though.  A baby turtle will go in the direction of the light; if you create artificial light, the turtle will go towards that light, rather than towards a moon-lit ocean.  “On the shores of Greece,” the warning sign on the beach says, “the fatally bright lights of the discotheques lured thousands of baby turtles to their deaths.” What’s man made is bigger, better and faster, even if it kills you. The narrator abandons his fascination with astronomy for manufactured thrills. In “Out to Sea,” a retirement community is set up on a group of houseboats; the waves, we’re told, are man-made, because the real ones were too rough. 

Some of her tales elicit genuine discomfort, a nervousness that’s got nothing to do with the pleasurable thrills of a horror story. The horror takes place off the page, and what remains is a suspended sense of loss, as characters seek either to escape or embrace life. In “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” the narrator has been abandoned by her father, left for the summer in her grandfather’s shack near Swamplandia! This is the family’s theme park, where Ava is forced to feed the captive alligators and clean while her “special” older sister, who suffers bizarre spells of possession by various “lovers,” is free to indulge in “entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.” In our over-medicated parlance—which is acerbically satirized in “ZZ’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers,” where parents unsatisfied with their children’s sleep habits send them to reform— we’d call Ossie autistic or schizophrenic. Ava wants to go along on her sister’s somnambulist sojourns through the swamps, wants to lose herself to some demon-lover, but she also wants to fight the alligators, asserting a material, human power. Swamplandia’s main attraction is a wrestling match between Ava’s father, Chief Bigtree, and the captive alligator. Describing such a match, the narrator says, “This tug-of-war goes on for a foamy length of time, while the crowd whoops and wahoos, cheering for our species. Finally, the Chief masters his Seth.” Whether the “Chief” is Indian or not is unclear, but this racial marker reverberates throughout the story, and we realize that the struggle between practical Ava and her shaman-like sister, between the Chief and the Seth, is a repetition of the struggle between white settlers and Native Americans over 400 hundred years, and the ensuing struggle to clear out as much land as possible for factories and mansions (and eventually outlet malls and condo developments.)

The strongest stories in this collection are “from The Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration” and the title story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves.” In “Reminiscences,” Russell reinvents the 19th-century rhetoric and legend of “Westward Ho!” and Manifest Destiny.  A caravan of wagons is traveling to the west, where “unclaimed” and “unpopulated” lands are up for grabs. In one of the travelling families, the father happens to be a Minotaur. He’s the epitome of civilization, the patriarch who, Columbus-like, leads his family on a treacherous pursuit of new land.  But he’s also an animal, pulling along the family’s wagon along with the oxen. The Minotaur is nature and he’s culture. In the nineteenth century—if I may lapse into back-thenism—the frontier was inextricable from the Indian populations; at a few points in the story, “the women worry in overloud voices that [a young traveler] will get lost, or fall victim to Indian depredation.” But as the narrator points out, “these same women regard him with a friendly terror,” while the men offer him a “peace pipe.” He’s accused of spreading lice to the children (“nits make lice” was the popular rhetoric regarding Indians and their problematic breeding). The nineteenth century was also a time of ideological shift in the so-called “Indian problem;” by the end of the century, displacement and extermination of Native Americans, like so many troublesome beasts, was phased out in favor of “civilizing” them, by packing the children off to boarding schools where they were trained to forget their language and customs, and to recognize their cultures as primitive and outdated. The Minotaur embodies this shift; his son, the narrator, says, “I had never seen someone so literally carried away by desire before. All the reason ebbed out of his eyes, replaced by a glazed, animal ecstasy. If he hadn’t been wearing polka-dot suspenders, you would have mistaken him for a regular old bull.” The minotaur’s marked as different, distinctly not-human (and not-white, not-American), yet his desires are the epitome of American need to conquer new territories, to spread out and accumulate things. 

The title story invokes this “project of civilization” ideology, as the sons and daughters of werewolves, human in looks but feral in manners, are sent to boarding schools in order to learn to be human. The children are taken out of the forest by well-meaning Jesuits, assured that it’s for their own good: “The nuns would make us naturalized citizens of human society. We would go to St. Lucy’s to study a better culture. We didn’t know at the time that our parents were sending us away for good.  Neither did they.” Like Indian children who were divested of their traditional clothes and long hair, whipped for not speaking English, and inculcated with the trappings of the “better culture,” so the children are taught to stand upright, wear shoes, groom themselves to eliminate the animal odor about them. The story’s arc is tragic, but inevitable; the ones who resist are abandoned to their own devices, in limbo between two now-hostile worlds. We follow the girls as they internalize the inferiority of their previous life, and when the narrator returns to her family, she sees them as grotesque and bestial. When she calls the place her home, she tells us, “It was my first human lie.”

It’s quite sad that none of the articles written about this book—and there have been quite a few—has offered any sort of historical reading of these two tales, and the collection as a whole. I don’t say this to remind you of how clever I am, and how stupid those New York Times writers are, but rather to point out how much of our history we’ve forgotten, that these rather sharp parallels between the strange and brutal fantasy worlds and material facts from the past—entire tribes wiped out by migration, generations of children brainwashed to loath themselves—simply do not register. One critic describes “St. Lucy’s Home” as a whimsical tale about the trials of growing up, which seems to me an exceedingly glib reading. Honestly, I don’t know if the author herself intended these parallels. I could go into a whole discussion of whether or not authorial intent even matters, but I’ll leave that for grad students to banter about over Dixie cups of lukewarm wine. It’s a subtle, beautifully written and haunting history.