Russell does not put it this way until very late in the book, “Swamplandia!” is fiercely centered on the idea of “mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.” But she has died of cancer, and her absence is one of this novel’s most vital and humanizing aspects.
Their mother, billed as Hilola Bigtree, was the place’s star attraction. “Swamplandia!” is narrated by Ava, one of three Sawtooth grandchildren who run the flailing tourist attraction of the title with the so-called Chief Bigtree, their father. “ ‘And when she didn’t scream,’ Sawtooth liked to say, ‘that’s when I knew we were staying.’ ” Russell writes of Grandma Risa’s first look at the place. “A tiny crab scuttled over Risa’s high-buttoned shoe,” Ms. Grandpa Sawtooth, né Schedrach, bought some wildlife-infested land in Florida, sight unseen, and took his wife there to live in 1932. And she filled in the blanks, expanding the short story’s Bigtree family and explaining how these snow-white Ohioans wound up masquerading as Indians on a swamp island in the Everglades. She honed her elegant verbal wit and fused it with the nightmare logic that makes “Swamplandia!” such an eccentric yet revelatory family story. The contrast between story and novel is a writing teacher’s dream. They are taught civilized behaviors, like feeding other animals (“Why don’t you and Mirabella take some pumpernickel down to the ducks?”) instead of killing them. So a pack of girls who once had names like HWRAA! and GWARR! get new ones like Claudette and Mirabella. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” the title piece invents a “Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock” and imagines nuns who apply its principles to the daughters of werewolves. In her only other book, the 2006 short story collection “St. Russell knows how to use bizarre ingredients to absolutely irresistible effect. Russell had you at “alligator wrestlers” not likely you may well recoil at every noxiously fanciful item on that list.īut wait. The proof is in “Swamplandia!,” a novel about alligator wrestlers, a balding brown bear named Judy Garland, a Bird Man specializing in buzzard removal, a pair of dueling Florida theme parks, rampaging melaleuca trees, a Ouija board and the dead but still flirtatious Louis Thanksgiving. Last year she wound up on The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list. In 2009 she received a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. Karen Russell, author of the wave-making debut novel “Swamplandia!,” was on New York Magazine’s 2005 list of 27 impressive New Yorkers under the age of 26.
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