“I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.”
This quote is an excellent example of the colorful yet oddly cobbled sentences in the novel told through the eyes of the naive Ava Bigtree. Here, she likens people that complain to the elderly in reference to the impotence that complaining achieves. The author, through the narrator, makes a disparate comparison between the act of complaining and the inability and helpless of old age flow into a seamless sentence that works.
“And then our mom got sick, sicker than a person should ever be allowed to get. I was twelve when she got her diagnosis and I was furious.”
The narrator recounts her mother’s bout with cancer, describing best as she can with her vocabulary her helplessness and frustration with her situation. Her narration of he mother’s illness is also a narration of the beginning of the end—for their family and their entire way of life. This is also an excellent example of the author’s insertions of local color, presenting the narrative using a Deep South syntax.
“It was only after Swamplandia!’s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you’re short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.”
Ava informs the reading audience with an air of fatigued casualness and defeat that events in their lives as a family fell out of rhythm in the worst possible way. She also alludes that it wasn’t just the cancer or the resultant death of her mother that led up to the fall of their family park/tourist attraction but rather a series of chain reactions triggered by her mother’s illness and death that could be best summarized by describing everything bad that has happened to the Bigtree family as a great fall from grace.
