1935, Dust Bowl Nebraska, a town called Uz. A prairie witch. A first generation Polish American farmer and his basketball player niece. A Black woman photographer. A crooked sheriff, a sentient scarecrow, a tornado, a dust storm, biblical rain, a camera that shows the future. Colonisation, climate damage, capitalism, individualism, genocide and forgotten histories. The Antidote, Pulitzer Prize nominee Karen Russell’s first novel in over a decade, is nothing short of ambitious and haunting. It is also, very often, a masterclass in great writing.
The Antidote starts with Black Sunday, when one of the worst dust storms in recorded history blew through multiple towns and prairies in the Midwest, burying houses, people, and animals under thousands of tonnes of destroyed topsoil from the over-cultivated lands. In Uz, the storm is just the latest in a string of events forcing people to leave town, their crops dried out, their futures bleak. But the prairie witch cannot leave; something has changed in her, even though she holds the town’s secrets, and her own. She calls herself The Antidote: a woman who offers her “banking servers as panacea for every ailment from heartburn to nightmares,” by absorbing and storing her customer’s memories, be they “sins and crimes, first and last times, nights of unspeakable horror and dewdrop blue mornings.” She does not know what these confessions are, because she slips into a trance, a “spacious blankness,” as her customers begin to whisper their memories into her ear horn, her body a “vault to store the things people cannot stand to know, or bear to forget,” a storage room for rent. The Antidote can hold these memories until her customers want them back—if they want them back—when, again in a trance state, she repeats back to them whatever they deposited in her, and “everything returns to them at once… Not only the events, but the envelope of time that surrounds them.”
But after Black Sunday, the Antidote realises she is empty of all of Uz’ deposits: “Fifteen years of deposits, somehow, had been siphoned from me while I slept. Drawn from my flesh, like vapor from a leaf.” When people start showing up at her door to get their memories back, she allows Asphodel, a young teen desperate to apprentice with her, to help her hide the situation from the townspeople by making up false memories to give back to them. Asphodel is certain she’s a witch too—or that she could be, given the training. As the newly minted captain of the much-ignored girls basketball team, she is adamant to earn enough money as the prairie witch’s apprentice to get her team to their games. She is also dealing with the loss of her mother, whose murder is what brought Asphodel to Uz, to her next of kin, her uncle Harp. Harp is the only one who appears to have survived the dust storm unscathed—his fields are blooming green, his house stands clean, even his scarecrow has somehow been untouched by the winds. It doesn’t make any sense, which is why Cleo, the photographer sent to the midwest by the Resettlement Administration to show America to the Americans, chooses to ignore her instructions and instead explore what may have been or what could be. She finds a camera in a pawn shop that, no matter what she plans or does, creates images that are not visible to the human eye—some of the past, some potentially of a utopian future.
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The Antidote
Cleo has been sent with a checklist of photos she should take, of white families outside their homes, in shops, doing regular, wholesome all American things. No one wants to see any starving Native children, or Pawnee families watching their native lands destroyed, or any Black people integrating with migrants in small towns, but Cleo wants to bear witness to more than what the authorities want to depict. Russell tells the story of these characters in alternating chapters that guide us through the novel via the perspective of each, and though each character’s voice is not as well defined as it could be, and there are quite a few meanderings for atmosphere and mis-en-scene, the story comes together steadily and surely, for the most part. Like Dorothy and her gang of ragtag misfits in Oz, Russell’s little gang also come together to reveal who or what is behind the curtain.
Are all the women characters witches? What makes a witch a witch, anyway? The Antidote knows she is a prairie witch, has known something changed in her when she was told the baby boy she gave birth to as an unwed teen had died. Asphodel, dealing with the murder of her mother, thinks she has something witchy in her already as she pushes her team to victory. Cleo, with her strange new camera, has come into a prophetic sort of power. The Antidote, for all her years of experience, can only guess at what has made her a witch: “I have my theories, and I have my doubts about all of them… Every witch I’ve ever met has experienced a shock from which she never recovered, a loss that is ongoing.” That shock, the Antidote believes, was a blast that opened a door in the women, a door that should have been healed and sealed with time, but in witchy women “there is no more door. There is a permanent opening… Space for rent.”
Prairie witches are an integral part of Russell’s imagined Midwestern landscape, with The Antidote being just one of the ‘vaults’ operating in the region. Each town or district has a witch; each witch is a memory bank for people’s secrets, dreams, desires and confessions. A prairie witch is needed, wanted, yet shunned and often abused. “There are no obituaries for prairie witches, because we are not supposed to exist. We are stains on the towns that support us. The towns that we support.” Uz’s Antidote is often used by the town sheriff to extract memories from people who know more than he’d like them to, because the sheriff, while not a good officer of the law, is nothing if not smart about self preservation. “A stupid man can still be a savant at torture,” says the Antidote, who ends up caught up in the Sheriff’s ploy to win a future election by heroically “solving” a series of murders, all of women, none he has actually investigated properly. That these murders are never actually solved in the story may be an annoyance to some readers, but it’s hard to believe this is a plot hole—leaving them unsolved was probably Russell’s point: Who cared about a series of dead women, when so much crop money was being lost to a drought? Certainly not the state.
There are parallels drawn between all the marginalised groups of people who suffered at the hands of the government leading up to and during the Dust Bowl ecological disasters—whether it be the native Pawnee tribes who were forcibly, violently removed from their home lands by European settlers, or the young unwed poorer immigrant mothers whose babies were taken away by a Puritanical state, or the native children forced into European colonial education systems that stripped them of their own heritage, or the Black people who had been freed but only in name. Russell uses the story of Polish settler families like Harp and Asphodel’s to tell her readers about families who moved to America to escape German occupation, only to get there and find that an entire indigenous population was being wiped out, and that they were now part of a system inflicting the same ethnic cleansing on Native Americans that they had run from themselves. Harp tells the townspeople of Uz (in a slightly too long and on the nose denouement), “the plow that broke these plains was the plow that broke my family back in German-occupied Poland: the plow of empire. The plow that displaces and murders people, tearing them from their homes. The plow that levels more than tall grass. The plow pushed by people like me.”
It is shockingly easy for people to forget how they came to where they are, how they owned the land they call home. Russell wants to remind her readers just how much of American history has been forgotten (by choice, by force, by the human need to imagine oneself free of blame in order to survive), and how much of human history is repeated, rewritten, spun to be given new meanings, all in the name of colonisation, capitalism, profit for the very few.
The Antidote is also the story of colonial biopolitics, of ecological disasters that are very much a part of global colonial history and yet often ignored in talk of climate change. The unregulated drive for profit, especially in settler times in America did more than just conduct a genocide of an entire population: It also destroyed a great deal of the arable farm land that Native tribes had been sustainably living off for their entire existence in the Great Plains.
Uz is an example of how European colonisers’ thoughtless farming practices brought about the manmade Dust Bowl drought, by removing native grasses to make way for wheat, by over-cultivating the land, leading to massive soil erosion. The ethnic cleansing of the Pawnee tribes in Nebraska lead directly to a breakdown in the climate of the region, and in The Antidote, the dust storms, the severe heat, drought and then torrential rains are more than just an ecological disaster of biblical proportions—they are all hauntings of an ugly past. Russell makes her stance very clear, via Harp, when he says, “our war created the conditions for the dust clouds that swallow the sun. Now we’re the ones forced to leave our homes—tractor off, dusted out, foreclosed on. It was a great collapse of memory that paved the way for our collapse.”
Russell’s new novel comes at a time when we are seeing genocides happen on our phone screens every day, of indigenous populations being wiped out in multiple places in the world, history repeated bitterly, violently. This novel is an elegy of loss—the loss of people, cultures, ways of life that moved in symbiosis with nature. It is about climate damage and climate politics, about intergenerational trauma, the concept of American individualism and hyper-capitalist nightmares, of counterfeiting fantasies as substitutes for factual history, of creating falsehoods by exclusion of certain memories just to allow us to carry on exhausting the earth. That she tackles all this poetically, with an elegant evocative prose, is a testament to her writing craft.
Although there is so much hopelessness in The Antidote, there is also hopefulness to be found: in the girls’ basketball team winning against all odds, in the shining green of Harp’s crop, in Cleo’s camera showing peaceful, positive futures, and even in the survival of the scarecrow, unscathed though tornados. There are miracles to be found even in great disasters, restoration and release in human bonds of love, family and community.
The Antidote is published by Knopf.
