Times are hard in Swamplandia!, the island tourist attraction that gives its name to American writer Karen Russell’s inventive second novel. Located in Florida’s miasmic Ten Thousand Islands region, the hardscrabble theme park is home to the Bigtrees, a family of allegedly native American alligator wrestlers that comes unstuck after the death of its matriarch, the glamorous Hilola. With her show-stealing moonlit dive into a gator-infested pond no longer on offer, the tourists stop coming, threatening the clan with emotional as well as fiscal bankruptcy. Things get even worse when a rival park, The World of Darkness, opens nearby.
In desperation, Hilola’s husband, the Chief, hits the road in order to raise capital. (The Bigtrees are in fact Caucasians, though they remain a tribe unto themselves.) Their son Kiwi also leaves home, taking a job as a lifeguard at The World of Darkness, where he winds up becoming a hero after rescuing the owner’s daughter from drowning.
His 16-year-old sister Ossie undertakes a very different sort of journey when she “elopes” with the ghost of a long-dead sailor, whom she claims to have met on an abandoned dredging boat that washes up at the park. After she vanishes into the infernal swamp in her mother’s stolen wedding dress, her 13-year-old sister Ava sets off in pursuit, accompanied by a mysterious bird hunter.
Swamplandia! is very much a mixed bag. Russell’s prose occasionally soars, such as when she refers to a boy who is “complected like a bowl of oatmeal”. Just as often, however, it proves as tangled as the region’s vast mangrove thickets, particularly when the author rolls out the folksy neologisms: “The tourists moved sproingily from buttock to buttock.”
The story is also uneven. The tale of the two flyaway sisters proves lyrically powerful as it maps the enchanted but dangerous worlds that young minds can conjure to deal with grief. Less effective are the sections of the novel given over to Kiwi, which are marred by overly broad satire and narrative implausibility. In the end, the novel proves to be something of a swamp itself, filled with mystery and beauty, but difficult to negotiate.