Trigger warning for sexual violence.
One of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl swept across an immense part of the United States on April 14, 1935. The storm moved an estimated 300 million tons of topsoil in a matter of hours. Karen Russell’s strange, affecting, new novel, The Antidote opens with the Black Sunday Storm. Storms feature heavily in this book. They scour away the past. They wash the present away, too. The storms leave so little behind that the only way to go on is to rebuild everything from the ground up.
The dust of Black Sunday in the opening chapter clears to reveal our primary trio of narrators: an angry teenager, a dour farmer, and a miserable prairie witch. We also hear from the most mysterious character, a scarecrow who doesn’t know who he is or why he’s a scarecrow in a wheat field. Another narrator—a photographer hired by the federal government to document the Dust Bowl—emerges a little later. The first character we meet is the Antidote herself, a prairie witch with the ability to take away people’s memories and magically store them for later retrieval. The witch, or Vault as she sometimes calls herself, never knows what people deposit with her. She’s in a trance the whole time. Thanks to the Antidote, the people of Uz, Nebraska, can forget whatever they don’t care to carry around in their brains. Unfortunately for the Antidote, the local sheriff has learned to use her to his advantage. Meanwhile, teenaged Asphodel and her melancholy uncle, Harp Oletsky, are learning to live together at the family farm. Dell had to come live with her uncle after her mother’s murder and now spends most of her time fiercely playing basketball with Uz’s girls’ team. Later, Cleo Allfrey arrives in Uz to take pictures, only to stumble upon something strange going on with the land in and around Uz.
There is a lot going on in The Antidote—some of it very tragic—but themes start to emerge across the chapters. After Black Sunday, Harp finds himself on an inexplicable lucky streak. He’s only farmer who is able to get a crop to grow in his fields and is very surprised to find himself suddenly elected as the head of the local grange. All of this is so baffling that he spends a lot of his time, out in his wheat field, trying to figure out how he came to be here, in this place. Scratching at his memories dredges up long-forgotten memories about the Pawnee who used to call this land home, until American settlers pushed them further and further away. At the same time, the Antidote discovers that the Black Sunday storm has somehow erased all of the memories she’s held in trust for so long. She has to fake her magic with the assistance of Dell, who badgers the older woman into taking her on as an apprentice in order to make money to support her basketball team. Being around Dell has the Antidote looking back to her own past, at the abuse and pain that turned her into a Vault. All of these characters, including Cleo, are forced to contemplate the way we forget or rewrite our histories. We like to think of the past as fixed but it’s a lot more volatile than we realize.
So much happens in The Antidote that I am barely scratching the surface here. In fact, I wish that I had read the book more slowly than I did, so that I could sit and spend more time ruminating on the characters’ memories and revelations. I was so hooked by all of the plots going on that I couldn’t stop reading. I had to know if the Antidote would ever be able to expose the monstrous sheriff and if Dell was going to win her season and if Cleo would be able to take a picture that truly captured what life was like out on the dusty, impoverished heartland of Nebraska. Most of all, I had to know what was going on with the scarecrow. I feel like The Antidote is going to become one of those books that I keep returning to, that I can reread many times and always find something new to think about. This book is truly extraordinary.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
