It takes an unconventional fabulist to address something so vast as American history. Karen Russell is known for surreal storytelling and fantastic language in work marked by slanted perspective and outlandish scenarios which illuminate dormant truths. She’s brought her skills to bear on acclaimed short fiction collections and her one previous novel, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist, “Swamplandia!” While that novel chronicled the decline of a Floridian carnival family clinging to family legend and land, her new novel, “The Antidote,” looks westward to the fictional Nebraska town of Uz during the 1930s.
Russell’s Uz is a desolate, ravaged Dust Bowl town where farmers have lost their crops and residents have perished thanks to extreme weather. A string of murdered women adds to the paranoia gripping the town.
Understandably, many of its remaining residents flee this wasteland. Those left behind are a desperate lot: A renegade sheriff takes the law into his own hands. Teenage girls find solace playing basketball on a dwindling team without a coach. Uncomfortably so, a bachelor second-generation farmer finds himself with the only thriving crop in town. And drunks find comfort at the bar in the Country Jentleman. Upstairs from the bar in the boarding house, lost souls confess their secrets to a prairie witch named the Antidote.
Their confessions are known as deposits, complete with a numbered slip. This transaction reduces the prairie witch into “a room for rent. A vault to store the things people cannot stand to know, or bear. To forget.” Removed from the community and yet an integral part of it, the Antidote is an orphaned Sicilian immigrant named Antonina Rossi who knows that “pain is never any one thing, it is always moving.” This prairie witch’s origin story is rooted in the loss of her only son and escape from the abusive home for unwed mothers where she was forced to wait out her pregnancy and give birth. All too familiar with the psychic weight of secrets, the Antidote remarks that “Memories are living things. When you house as many as I did, your bones begin to creak.”
The caustic nature of memory and secrets seizes Russell’s fascination. Historians and biographers work around archival gaps to delicately stitch together suppressed histories, but fiction writers can take more creative liberties to reconcile the past. As history becomes more threatened by censorship, fiction helps shape public discourse. Enter the new relevance of historical novels: Examples include Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” and Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” which each tackle expansive themes across contentious historical periods. Most directly, “The Antidote” harkens to Eleanor Catton’s Booker award winning “The Luminaries,” which centers around the mysteries of a gold rush port town in New Zealand. Both books are rife with mystery and the spoils of greed.
All these books ask their readers to juggle multiple plot threads and a cascade of characters. Their success is dependent on sustaining your fascination for secrets behind the surface.
Big books make enormous demands: Readers tend to love them or hate them. And while Russell’s career took off thanks to the universally riotous praise for her short stories, I’d argue that she takes even bigger risks in her novels. They offer a more complicated and thus greater reward. With crackling pastoral language and thematic Lynchian undertones, “Swamplandia!” probed the growing tension in Russell’s home state of Florida between an endangered fecund wilderness and encroaching development. In it, her young heroine remarks, “At ten, I couldn’t articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.” Russell has taken these words to heart. With “The Antidote,” Russell raises the stakes of her efforts as a novelist.
Gripped by the legacy of land theft and the forced migration of Native Americans, Russell constructed a novel underpinned by an elaborate embroidery of social, geological, historical, and environmental research on the impact of American Western expansion. She speaks to this extensive work in an author’s note and a land lost acknowledgment. Her prairie witch carries the moral burdens of a bankrupt society that shames women and strips the land of its resources as well as its native inhabitants, leaving little for those left behind.
Russell could have written a smaller, less ambitious, book centered only around the Antidote and her immediate clients. However, drawing from her skills as a short story writer, she effortlessly weaves in other characters whose unique gifts shed light on the lacunae of history. Cleo Allfrey is a WPA photographer and somewhat androgynous Black woman assigned to document the West. Despite the strict guidelines that steer her work into the realm of propaganda, her work is something beyond commercial art. What develops in the darkroom are visions that speak to the possibility of a harmonious future, signal to a prosperous past, and highlight present horrors. The memories she captures are tangible in ways that the Antidote’s are not. Each woman recognizes the mercurial power of memories. Together, they find sanctuary on the only unblemished farmland in Uz, which belongs to Harp and Dell Oletsky.
If this sounds like a dense novel, you’re only halfway right. The book is threaded with more subplots and histories as well as characters than I can elaborate upon here. However, her sharp narrative grasp guides the reader from character to character as the book unfolds. Russell’s vivid characters retain an element of mystery, which speaks to the novel’s larger point. History makes clear the gap between what we know and what we can only presume to be true. Russell is at her strongest in moments of intimacy — be it maternal or conventionally romantic. There’s an awkward and unspoken bond between her band of misfits. Independent of one another, they’re untethered and grossly misunderstood. As a unified front, they manage to reveal the town’s most sinister mysteries.
Harp, the lone man among this chosen crew, reflects: “Anything that is yours alone can become a curse, even good fortune. This understanding hit me with the force of revelation. Words alone won’t do it justice.” Russell works with imagined backstories and harsh facts to draw connections between unexplained phenomena like extreme weather and inexplicable cruelty. Just as Allfrey’s photographs were “crowded with lifetimes,” so is Russell’s novel, a work suffused with the “mystery of kindness” and the banality of violence.
LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
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