Something I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately is how troubles or even catastrophe don’t excuse a person from having to take out the trash or pick up milk or pay the water bill. At the same time, they can exist separately from the small victories, like finally beating your partner at Mario Kart, as one random and totally made-up example, even though that little pixilated trophy on the screen means nothing against whatever great sorrow was inflicted in the world during the same span of minutes or hours. It’s a strange balance, the banal and the profound, and one that Karen Russell seems to play with in her new novel, The Antidote.
Years into the Dust Bowl, the small Nebraska town of Uz has lost a third of its residents, and counting, as the topsoil continues to blow and the sky stubbornly stays clear of rainclouds—and that’s before a whopper of a dust storm nearly blows the rest of town away. In the aftermath of Black Sunday, as it comes to be known, the prairie witch in town, known only as the Antidote, is horrified to realize that all the secrets the townspeople have whispered to her, and ostensibly intended to retrieve when they were ready to face them, have been blown away, too. Outside town, something strange is happening with an old scarecrow standing in a dry field. Its owner, Herb, is none the wiser, though everyone else notices when the wheat surrounding the scarecrow starts to grow. As for his niece, Dell, the basketball championship is coming up, and it looks like Uz’s little team of baller-ettes has a shot at winning it.
But Dell has more on her mind, too. There’s a hole she’s felt yawning inside since the recent murder of her mother, and she fears that means she’s turned into a prairie witch herself. Though the Antidote thinks Dell’s prospects are blessedly dim for assuming such a tough role, she nonetheless hires Dell on to help her find a way to make up for the lost secrets as the residents of Uz come calling for a bank run of a different kind. Meanwhile, a photographer sent from the government to capture scenes from the Dust Bowl finds her camera is committing more to film than is in front of her lens.
The Antidote is less sprawling than it is multifaceted, though it does both, and mostly to great effect. Though each character narrates in the first person, their voice is distinct enough, not just to avoid confusion, but to sink into their respective narratives of the unfolding story. That immersive experience makes the largely slow pace of the story unfolding a feature, not a bug; each pebble overturned by the toe of a character’s shoe brings us a little closer to understanding Uz.
Yet as The Antidote reminds us, there’s no understanding a place, or its people, if there is no reconciliation with the most difficult parts of that person or place. The Antidote, and prairie witches like her, keep all the unpleasant things within them so the owner doesn’t have to lose sleep over them—and never will, if they don’t choose to withdraw those secrets from her. The secret wants and regrets and shames, though, are pieces of their creator, and missing them means missing a piece of that thing of origin. Late in the book, Herb takes a deposit slip left by his father and retrieves the memory from a different prairie witch. What follows is the most heavy-handed part of the narrative, but it’s also filled with ideas that refuse to stop being timely. “Better you than me,” it’s easy to say in situations of inequity—just as easy as it is to forget how fragile our positions of relative privilege can be.
As relevant as that message is for readers of this Dust Bowl tale, so, too, is the theme of the photographer’s pictures. The camera shows the landscape—but there’s no predicting whether the photos will show it as it is in the present, or the past, or the future. In the many visions of possible futures, the message the camera sends is clear: tomorrow isn’t set in stone, and small choices today can radically change how what follows unfolds.
The Antidote is a modern story, and these are certainly points to keep close and hold tight. But it’s curious how easily you can imagine them applying to the real people in the Dust Bowl era watching their American Dream literally blow away. Hope and shame aren’t two sides to the same coin, but they’re two coins that get carried around in the same change a lot. Both can be hard to bear and dangerous in their own way, too. Sometimes it takes both the recklessness of the former and the responsibility of the latter to persevere and make the future better than the past, no matter how bleak the present appears.
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