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A Novel
by Karen Russell
Book Reviewed by:From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town.
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples' memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch's apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town's secrets and its fate.
Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation's forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
It's a captivating story; part of the fun of the novel is seeing how Russell ties the plotlines together, and the satisfying way she does so is a wonder to behold... Russell explores not only environmental issues, but racism, the displacement of Native Americans by government-sponsored settlers, the perceived role of women in 1930s America, and much more...continued
Full Review
(714 words)
(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
One of the protagonists in The Antidote is Cleo Allfrey, a photographer dispatched by the Resettlement Administration to document life in Nebraska's Dust Bowl. She and others in the book mention a similar, real-world project: a documentary titled The Plow That Broke the Plains.
The Plow That Broke the Plains was a controversial, federally funded film that explored the causes behind the Dust Bowl. In the time of the booming demand for grain during and right after World War I, Midwestern farmers looked for ways to improve their land's yield. In the Great Plains in particular—a grassland prairie ecosystem that stretches across the middle part of the United States—one method was to plow up native grasses so more wheat could ...
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With The Antidote, Karen Russell proves once again that there is no limit to her extraordinary imagination. She creates marvels out of what we imagine to be the ordinary world, she turns the historical novel upside down and shakes from it a thing of exquisite beauty that is unlike anything you've ever read.
