Hannah’s Pick of the Week: The Antidote by Karen Russell

“I could not hear even one of them over the screaming wind. But that is a sight that will never leave me. The waves of earth crashing over the prairie. The sky exhaling all her birds.“

Karen Russell, The Antidote, pg. 23

Uz, Nebraska, is full of ghosts; ghosts of regrets, of accidents, of mistakes that make it difficult to breathe in. That’s what the Prairie Witch is there for. She takes in these memories as a “vault,” a bank for traumas. The Antidote (as the Prairie Witch is known) holds onto the violence enacted onto the bodies of the citizens of Uz. But when the Black Sunday dust storm hits, The Antidote wakes up 15 pounds lighter: she’s become bankrupt, the memories gone from her stores.

The Antidote studies the collision of Uz’s denizens with the everyday trials of life in 1930’s Nebraska. Harp Oletsky, a Polish-American farmer, contends with the arrival of his niece, Del, after his sister’s murder. Del lives purely for playing basketball after her mother’s death, only for her to enter into The Antidote’s orbit. In between, interludes supplied by a scarecrow break up the ongoing threads of Uz’s local politics. Later, New Deal photographer Cleo Allfrey enters the picture in order to create marketing for what Harp calls “Roosevelt’s alphabet soup agencies.”

Russell interweaves each of these characters with a finesse that’s only balanced out by the flintiness of the people themselves. Historical fiction meets magical realism, with the threat of ecological catastrophe always looming large. I think it’s safe to say The Antidote barrels to the occasion as one of the most enrapturing portrayals of violence begetting violence in an era in which you are expected to grin and bear what you can get, dust in your teeth and all. The Antidote is a great next read for those who enjoyed Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips and Betty by Tiffany McDaniel.