Karen Russell
Fiction 2025/ 419 pages
A change in perspective is often useful. I was calling this book boring and then decided to read a few reviews to see if I was alone. Many people loved it, and a few reviewed is as “slow-moving.” This helped a lot! Once I saw it as slow-moving it became less boring. I was ready to accept it for what it is. Four days into reading The Antidote, we were just a week from the book’s instigating event, the Black Sunday Dust Bowl in Uz Nebraska, on April 14, 1935.
Asphodel Oletsky, also known as Del, in the primary character, I believe, though some feel Antonia Rossi, also known as The Prairie Witch, or The Antidote, is the main character. Not important who is correct … but clearly there are at least two critical women characters.
We begin with vivid descriptions of the unimaginable dust in the Dust Bowl, where you could be right outside your house and not see it, due to blowing dust. The dust destroys everything … homes, animals, and especially, land and crops. How are the people of Uz (and all of Nebraska?) supposed to survive? There are multiple stories that progress through the book.
Del lives with her uncle Harp Oletsky, after her mother was murdered. One of the story lines in The Antidote is about the discovery of her murderer. A young ne’er-do-well man is accused of seven murders, including Lada, Del’s mother. But then his execution is botched, just in time to learn that the cruel and corrupt Sheriff fabricated evidence.
Del becomes connected to a Prairie Witch. Prairie Witches are the primary manifestation of magical realism in the book. The role of Prairie Witches (or Vaults) is to hear the memories people most need to forget, and to “store” them for the client. People walk out of a session with a Prairie Witch, being greatly relieved to be freed of their memory, which they truthfully no longer remember. They can return any time and recapture the memory (except the Prairie Witch typically loses track of the memories and has to make one up.). Del apprentices to the Prairie Witch.
Through the book, the Prairie Witch reveals more and more about her life story, the center of which is having her newborn son taken from her without her permission at a barbaric “home for unwed mothers.” …. A sign of the times.
We watch Harp, Del’s uncle, change from a gruff unfeeling man to a tender soul. There is much imbued in his story about how his family immigrated from Poland and how unfair and unwise it was, he sees now, to kick all the Natives off the land and attempt to farm it themselves, as white people from other countries and geographies.
Del is Captain of her high-school age basketball team. The team are fast friends and often play deep into the night. I think the author never played basketball. She manages to play the numerous scenes out with no heart, no real sense of play or joy or realty. Basketball is my favorite sport. I played intramural for six years, and somehow the author, Russell, is unable to capture the soul of girl’s basketball.
One of my two favorite characters is Cleo Allfrey. Cleo is a Black photographer hired by the government to go out west and take pictures of the people living in the deep Midwest, their lifestyle, how they earn a living and govern themselves. Unfortunately, Cleo’s boss does not like her photographs. They are not sanitized enough. They show real people with real emotions doing real things. He wants only happy White people. He has a hole punch and we see many of her photographs with a hole punched through the face of a mother holding her baby, or a woman hugging her sister over a basket of food they harvested. I found the holes punch in these photographs exceedingly sad. Cleo eventually finds an old accordion camera, which leads to the book’s denouement. Her camera takes photographs of the world around her. But when they develop, they show scenes in the photograph of past and future events. Another interesting piece of magical realism.
My other favorite minor character is the Scarecrow, who stands ever secure in his field, and occasionally has one-or two-paragraph chapters as he wisely communicates what he sees in the world.
Karen Russell’s prose is excellent. The Antidote reads almost in real time. Slow, in depth, rich. This book will not grab you by your emotions and pull you in. You must just decide to commit to it. I am glad I did and I can finally now recommend it.
June 2025