To precocity and beyond

SOME young writers arrive so fully formed you wonder in what direction they could possibly grow.

SOME young writers arrive so fully formed you wonder in what direction they could possibly grow.

What shadows your admiration is the fear they will be stunted by their own facility, like child prodigies who slide from promise into oblivion when maturity robs them of their one trick, precocity.

American writer Karen Russell had a story published by The New Yorker when she was 19. Her first collection of short fiction, St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006), was welcomed as one of the strongest debuts in recent memory. Last year she made it on to The New Yorker's list of 20 writers under 40 "who capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction" -- and she had more than a decade to spare.

So Swamplandia!, her first novel, arrives under the heavy burden of anticipation. That it should prove to be as light on its feet, as full of joy even, in the face of the tragedy it relates, is a tribute not to Russell's talent but something deeper: her ability to shut out worldly babble and disappear into her own creation.

The world of Swamplandia! will be familiar to readers of Russell's early collection, and in particular its story Ava Wrestles an Alligator, in which a young girl who living in a threadbare 'gator theme park somewhere in the Florida Everglades narrates her emotional and physical abandonment by a pretty, teenaged older sister, who claims to have been seduced by a ghostly boyfriend.

Over the 300-odd pages of Swamplandia! Russell whips the tale to a novelistic thickness, bringing us an account of one family's collapse in the wake of a mother's death from cancer. The fuller background alters our understanding of the supernatural material from the source story. The original's lurid weirdness is partly buried beneath layers of mundane domestic detail.

Ava, our main narrator, is 13 when we meet her: a bright, vivid child in thrall to her family's self-mythologising (her father has invented a history for the family -- right down to their surname, Bigtree, borrowed from an historical Indian chief -- to satisfy the tourists who ferry out to their island in search of native exotica).

She takes it for granted that her father will revive the family fortunes after her mother's death. But Hilola Bigtree was Swamplandia's star attraction -- each night she dived from a board into a pond filled with alligators, calmly swimming through them to shore to the audience's clenched dismay -- and with her absence the crowds have dissolved. Young Ava cannot or will not appreciate that her father has been broken by his loss, that the outlandish schemes he proposes to bring visitors back are evidence of grief unmoored.

Ava's siblings are pitched further forward, both in their adult understanding and their ability to act independently in the light of this knowledge. Kiwi is 17 and chafing against his island confinement. He lights for the mainland in an effort to earn enough money to keep the family out of debt, only to find himself in a low-wage job at the Bigtree's local competitor, a vile and soulless theme park called the World of Darkness.

Oceola is 16, attractive, otherworldy; her sexuality the hinge on which a shaky sanity swings. She uses an old manual for spiritualists and a ouija board to try to contact her mother. Instead she meets dead men -- boyfriends, she calls them -- who lure her into the swamp for nightly trysts. It is the last of these with whom she falls in love, a dredge operator, a handsome young man who died in the nearby swamp during the height of the Depression. Her decision to elope with his ghost drives Ava to leave the island in pursuit, an underworld odyssey that brings the narrative to its fraught conclusion.

Swamplandia! unfolds at a halfway point between dreary reality and sheer fantasy. We are never sure if the oddities Ava describes are an accurate rendering of the world or an immature effort to fill in the blanks.

Russell's language is anything but childish, however. A born stylist, she yokes together unlikely registers with the insouciance of Hilola diving in the gator-filled dam. Lyrical melancholy and low wit, inspired flights and and scatalogical swoops fill the same sentence, just as the exquisite and ageless verdancy of the Everglades is marred by the contemporary ugliness of a culture of consumption and exploitation. No emerging American writer aside from Wells Tower can make these unlikely marriages work. And few writers anywhere could so beautifully turn a family's daily occupations into sacred acts:

Each night he burned our garbage in a ditch behind the coop. This was one of the last Bigtree routines to go . . . Columns of thick smoke rose from the chicken coop like rainfall reversing itself, spraying up into the cumulus puffs in the night sky. From the kitchen windows, I would watch the Chief build his midweek pyre: leftovers and little bones and milk cartons, eggshells and newspapers, a grab-bag of detritus. Whatever we couldn't use or sell before nightfall, our chieftan struck a match against and sent it to the stars.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.