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Synopsis:

From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

Review:

Like everything I have read by Karen Russell, The Antidote is a difficult book to review. The story intertwines five characters, with three-ish narrators (there are a few more, but there are three main narrators) set in a Nebraska town where people are leaving at an alarming rate due to the failure of their crops and farms. With the real life devastation of loss and failure as the backdrop, Russell writes a story filled with superstition, magical realism, and hope. One of the main characters, known as the Antidote, is a “Prairie Witch” or “Vault”, a person who for a small fee will hold onto your worst memories and secrets so that you can live a happy life. She encounters a young girl, Dell, who has lost her mother and is living with her uncle Harp, who’s farm is the only one where crops seem to be thriving under the watchful eye of a sentient scarecrow. Added to this is a serial killer, The Lucky Rabbit Foot Killer going through Nebraska killing women, crooked cops, and a black photographer, Cleo, who has been sent to Nebraska to be a photographer for FDR, but whose camera is taking photographs of the horrible history of the region. The Antidote is a deeply unsettling yet wonderfully beautiful novel that is not easily forgotten.

This is not a quick read. This is not a novel that you can just zip through and go onto the next thing. Karen Russell writes books that demand your attention, that need to be absorbed. Stories that will sink into you and make you think about them for hours when you are not reading. The density of her writing is one of those aspects that can be appreciated because the story is supposed to be heavy, the situation the characters find themselves in is difficult, and the deep sadness of loss and everything that you own being destroyed is something that can be felt in the pages of The Antidote, like the hurt that the characters experience is real. And some of the story is real. The story of The Antidote is told against the backdrop of a drought in Nebraska, with dust storms killing crops and everyone starving to death. The buffaloes have been slaughtered, and the Native Americans have been pushed off the land. The violence and blood have soaked into the land, and this story is the result of this history. The real history and the magic that Russell adds makes a story that is immersive and heartbreaking.

Karen Russell’s writing is hard to review because it is nearly perfect. This is one of the few novels I have read in a long time where I just want to write “No notes.” Russell has written another novel where there is not much that can be said about it besides praise. Though it is not an easy read, it is an important read because Russell is writing the new American classics. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.