The world we occupy today is one without magical realism. But our relationship with memory and history can feel as peculiar as the strange happenings in Uz, Nebraska, the small town at the center of Karen Russell’s new novel, The Antidote.
The Antidote—the book’s namesake character—is one of several prairie witches surviving in the Dust Bowl of Depression-era Nebraska. Life is hard in Uz, especially after the 1935 Black Sunday dust storm devastates the already barely fertile land and snatches the lives of many of Uz’s residents. The Antidote makes her living by absorbing the memories people choose to “deposit” in her. She is a bank vault for grief and trauma to help those around her move on from painful pasts. When people deposit a memory, they leave recalling only that their hearts are more buoyant and their spirits more liberated than before they arrived. A simple vault deposit slip is the only reminder that they ever paid a visit to the Antidote at all.
But because they’re human, many return with their deposit slips one day, wishing to retrieve those memories after all. However, we learn that the Antidote has lost all the deposits in the dust storm. She and her apprentice must rely on secondhand retellings and outright lies to fool their customers.
The prairie witch’s apprentice, Dell Olestsky, comes from a family of Polish immigrants, and is a spunky young basketball player being raised by her uncle because her mother was killed by the Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer, the loss a “wound that encased her like a scabbard.” She believes she too may be a prairie witch, her magic sparked by personal tragedy, as the Antidote’s once was.
The beauty of magical realism is that there’s no need for world building, no need to devise laws of magic. Readers accept the mysteries without hunting for incongruities.
The book has three other narrators, whose perspectives and tone shift as the novel develops—my favorite, for its brief vivid poignancy, is a Scarecrow who miraculously survives the dust storm. Of course, Russell’s nod to another magical story about a Midwest storm featuring a scarecrow was immediately clear to me, but I didn’t realize until later that the Land of Uz is the home of Job—who too wrestled with suffering—in the Hebrew Bible.
I love stories about the old West, and this one is no different. We have a corrupt sheriff, wheat farms, a saloon, a house for unwed mothers, and dead jackrabbits. Real Depression-era photographs are interspersed throughout, recast as taken by one of the narrators, a Black photographer named Cleo Allfrey, sent by the federal government to create propaganda for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Biblical level climate disasters meet stories of immigration and displacement, all set against a backdrop defined by atrocities against Native people.
This book is about staging “insurrections of laughter” in the face of harsh cruelty, yawning bodies curling against the people they love most, and detangling old memories and recent histories. It is an American Epic for this modern era, when our grasp on the truth of history–the destruction of both people and land that occurred in the founding of America–has rarely felt more tenuous.