Karen Russell’s ‘The Antidote’ is an American epic — and well worth the wait

No one summons up the “old weird America” in fiction like Karen Russell does. Her tall tales of alligator wrestlers in Florida, homesteaders on the Gothic Great Plains and female prospectors digging for gold mash up history with the macabre in a cracker barrel aged with dry humor.

Russell’s celebrated debut novel Swamplandia! came out in 2011. Since then, she’s published a couple of excellent short story collections; but, the wait for another novel was growing a little strained. I even heard speculation that maybe all the acclaim Russell received for her first novel had blocked her. Well, The Antidote has just come out and now we know why it took so long: American epics take a while.

The Antidote is set in a Dust Bowl-era Nebraska town called “Uz,” but it also reaches back to the earlier pioneer era Russell evoked in her short story masterpiece, “Proving Up,” which was made into an opera. The novel is framed by two true weather catastrophes: The “Black Sunday” dust storm on April 14, 1935 — in which people were suffocated by a moving black wall of dust — and, a month later, the Republican River flood when 24 inches of rain fell within one day. Much of what occurs between those two disasters is also “true” emotionally, but, in Russell’s world view, the fantastic and the familiar coexist on the same plane.

Our central character here is a Prairie Witch who goes by the name, “The Antidote.” Part huckster, mostly healer, she, like other Prairie Witches, promises to treat what ails her customers by taking away “whatever they can’t stand to know. The memories that make them chase impossible dreams, that make them sick with regret and grief. … Whatever cargo unbalances the cart. I can hold on to anything for anyone. Milk, honey, rainwater, venom, blood … —pour it all into me. I am the empty bottle.”

Lying in a trance, The Antidote absorbs the heaviness, but not the details, of her customers’ stories, which they sometimes want back. After the Black Sunday dust settles, however, The Antidote is horrified to realize she feels lighter, vacant — some awful force has robbed her of the stories she’s safeguarded. Who knows how her more violent customers will react when they discover they can’t make withdrawals?

Other narrators step in to amplify Russell’s peculiar vision of life in Uz: There’s Dell Oletsky, a teenage girl whose single mother was allegedly murdered by the “Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer,” so called because he leaves a bloody rabbit’s foot near his victim’s bodies. Dell lives with her uncle, Harp, whose farm is mysteriously untouched by the all-enveloping dust.

A federal agency photographer, a Black woman named Cleo Allfrey, eventually turns up in Uz. Cleo explains her work by saying she’s “making advertisements for Roosevelt’s New Deal programs”; she’s also painfully aware of whose faces “carried the most weight with Congress.” Actual Depression-era photographs are scattered throughout this novel, but the camera Cleo depends on goes Twilight-Zone haywire, photographing the past and possible futures of the town and surrounding terrain.

Like Cleo’s camera, Russell’s instrument — her language — is uncanny. Swathes of the spellbinding final third of this novel move deeply into the past, specifically into the buried memory of how Harp Oletsky’s parents in Poland grabbed at the offer of free land in Nebraska; land, they come to realize, that was occupied before their arrival.

Here’s Harp’s father guiltily recalling how he made peace, not only with that land grab, but with racial hierarchy in America: “I was born a serf in all but name, … My skin is the color of an unwashed onion. In America, this placed me ahead of many. On a low rung of the ladder, but higher than the Black porter. … I heard the ticking pulse of a sick relief: not me not me not me … The same feeling I once had … whenever one of my brothers was chosen over me for a beating.”

In The Antidote, Karen Russell, America’s own Prairie Witch of a writer, exhumes memories out of the collective national unconscious and invites us to see our history in full. There are, alas, no antidotes for history. Our consolations are found in writers like Russell who refract horror and wonder through their own strange looking glass, leaving us energized for that next astounding thing.