In a family-run amusement park in the Everglades, a woman in a green bathing suit stands on a diving board high above a manmade lake. Below her in the murky water are dozens of alligators. She pinches back her shoulder blades and, as several hundred tourists look on in disbelief, prepares to dive.
The woman goes by the unlikely name of Hilola Bigtree. She is married to a man who calls himself the Chief and wears a headdress, even though his family – "the Bigtree tribe of the Ten Thousand Islands" – haven't a drop of Indian blood between them: they moved here from a coal-mining town in Ohio a generation ago. The narrator is their daughter Ava, who watches her mother every night from the stands.
Hilola's plunge isn't the only daredevil act here: Karen Russell's description of it in the opening pages of Swamplandia! is executed with no less flourish and no small risk. Nights in the swamp, Ava tells us, were "dark and star-lepered". The alligators have "icicle overbites", and when Hilola hits the water, "a plump and switching tail" cuts into the "margarine wavelengths" of the spotlight tracking her across the lake. Her high-wire prose won Russell plaudits when this debut novel first came out last year: the New York Times included Swamplandia! in its 10 books of 2011 and it was longlisted for the Orange prize.
Hilola survives her performance night after night. It's not an alligator's maw that carries her off but something more grimly mundane – ovarian cancer. Although barely a teenager at the time, Ava wrestles bravely with the loss. It's her older sister Osceola who can't cope with the reality of their mother's death. When she takes off into the swamp with a phantom lover, Ava is drawn along in her wake.
Russell creates a vivid sense of how reality and fantasy can intertwine in a child's mind and become indistinguishable. Ava isn't by nature credulous – she questions the notion of a spirit world even as she sets off to find it. But how, when your family's very identity is a fiction, can you be expected to keep a tight lid on make-believe?
It's hard not to root for Ava and her stricken tribe. However, Russell's own daredevil act soon runs out of steam. If anything, the language becomes even more exuberant but its impact gradually wanes, and in her effort to sustain it, Russell loses a handle on the plot. Ava's journey to the underworld with the Charon-like Birdman is compelling enough, but her older brother's defection to a rival theme park on the mainland is mishandled. What comes through most powerfully in Russell's fertile prose is the humid, mosquito-ridden atmosphere of the Florida swamp and the beguiling strangeness of the creatures – humans included – that make it their home.
