'Swamplandia!': Fiction

Karen Russell's novel features a Florida theme park family coming apart at the seams.

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To 13-year-old Ava Bigtree, the world is a theme park.

Literally. Her parents run a theme park called “Swamplandia!” on a island off the coast of Florida, with her mother as the alligator-wrestling main attraction. Free to roam the island when tourists aren’t around, Ava can’t imagine a more ideal life. She has her own theme park! With alligators! It’s a childhood fantasy come true.

But when Karen Russell’s 2011 novel “Swamplandia!” begins, Ava’s mom has just died. Without her, the family struggles to keep the park afloat. It begins to look as if they’ll have to give up and move to the mainland, a prospect that alarms Ava.

I would shrivel on the mainland, dry up in that crush of cars and strangers, of flesh hidden inside metallic colors, the salt white of the sky over the interstate highway, the strange pink-and-white apartment complexes where mainlanders lived like cutlery in drawers.

Without “Swamplandia,” Ava thinks, her family will turn into another set of anonymous faces, like the faces of the tourists they entertain by the hundreds.

But while Ava tries to train herself to take her mother’s place so she can revive “Swamplandia!,” the rest of her family abandons their island, one by one: Her brother, Kiwi, slips away in secret to look for a job on the mainland. Their father follows soon after, promising to come back with capital. Ava’s sister, Ossie, falls in love with a ghost and goes off to marry him.

Then a worker whom Ava’s father occasionally hires, a loner known only as the Bird Man, turns up on the island. He tells Ava he’ll help her find Ossie — they’ll take a boat to the underworld, where Ossie is, he says — and so Ava, too, leaves her beloved theme park, taking with her only one baby alligator she’s raised in secret.

In a way, “Swamplandia!” is a coming-of-age story for a whole family. It’s unevenly paced, as Russell focuses on Kiwi’s and Ava’s stories to the point where they become a little tedious. Kiwi, who’s ended up working for the competition, a thoroughly corporate theme park, is mocked by his co-workers and exploited by his bosses over and over and over; Ava’s boat trip at times feels as if it’s taking place in real time. I wanted to know more about Ossie and the kids’ father, who goes by Chief. (This is apparently some sort of fake homage to a vanished tribe for credulous tourists, but if it’s meant to be satire, it fell flat for me.)

Just when it seems Ava and her family are irrevocably lost to one another, Russell uses a little deus ex machina to reunite them. But they don’t return to the island. Their theme park is done, and so is their fantasy.