In Florida Slough With the Gators and Family Ghosts

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. Sound appealing? No, it does not. Unless Ms. Russell had you at “alligator wrestlers” — not likely — you may well recoil at every noxiously fanciful item on that list.

But wait. Ms. Russell knows how to use bizarre ingredients to absolutely irresistible effect. In her only other book, the 2006 short story collection “St. 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. So a pack of girls who once had names like HWRAA! and GWARR! get new ones like Claudette and Mirabella. 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.

They learn polite conversation. (“My stars,” I growled. “What lovely weather we’ve been having.”) And other, similarly jokey things happen. But the wolf story moves seamlessly toward an ending so inspired that it outdoes the book’s opening tale, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator.” And the “Ava” story is the short-form, nascent version of what has become “Swamplandia!”




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