The two story collections and novella that we’ve received from Karen Russell since her first novel, the 2012 Pulitzer finalist Swamplandia!, is part of the reason the decade-plus we have waited for her second novel hasn’t felt like such a long drought: We’ve rarely had to go without her brilliance and arch humor.
The Antidote is set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. The name of the town comes from the Book of Job, but it’s also a clear nod to L. Frank Baum’s Oz. Uz is a little bit over the rainbow but mostly under it, a place of both hopelessness and possibility, and the events of the novel occur between two real disasters in 1935: the Black Sunday dust storm and the deadly Republican River flood.
The narrative’s host of lead characters includes (but is not limited to) a witch, a wheat farmer, a New Deal photographer, a scarecrow and a young basketball player mourning her mother’s murder. The witch is a “Vault,” which means she has the ability to store memories for the citizens of Uz, but during the Black Sunday storm, she goes bankrupt, losing all her clients’ deposits. Meanwhile, the farmer has found his crop to be flourishing, in awkward contrast to his neighbors’ devastation, and the photographer has discovered that her camera captures more than just scenes of Uz, instead revealing glimpses through time to the land’s past and possible futures.
Similar to Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, The Antidote offers a long view of American history, through not just characters’ histories but also the legacy of the land itself. We hear the stories of Polish refugees seeking the promise of American soil alongside tales of prisonlike maternity homes, Indigenous genocide and government-funded, often church-run Indian boarding schools—American history that is very, very hard to talk about.
The pain of The Antidote is that it reminds you that you are only one person, and one voice does nothing to break a cycle of willful ignorance. But the joy of the novel is its immense sense of gratitude, as powerful a force as fear and wind, but quieter in its orchestrations. Gratitude is what transforms the lives of the witch, the farmer, the basketballer and the photographer, each of whom finds themselves out of step with the dominant practice of forgetting.
Russell’s novel is deeply researched, with a narrative that is propulsive and consuming, and characters who are tender and complicated. She does the hard work of looking directly at something that we’d rather allow our eyes to glance away from—which makes her the best kind of author, one who will lead you to the hard thing and stay there with you.
