Review: Four characters weather the Dust Bowl in ‘The Antidote’

Karen Russell’s “The Antidote,” her first novel since Pulitzer Prize finalist “Swamplandia,” does not make it easy on reviewers.

This is partly a factor of the Dust Bowl-era novel’s structure, which is divided into chapters narrated by about 10 characters (including a scarecrow and, in one chapter, a cat). Their voices are not as differentiated as you’d hope and it takes almost half of the book’s 400 pages for their stories to coalesce. Which is to say: It takes some time for “The Antidote” to get going but, from the moment that happens, the book is a knockout.

The title character is a sort of sin eater, a self-proclaimed “prairie witch” who calls herself the Antidote because she takes away the problems of others. Patrons speak their darkest secrets into her ear horn, she (supposedly) doesn’t even hear them but files them away until patrons wish to withdraw their deposits — something no one ever seems to want to do once they’ve relieved themselves of their stories of mischief, crimes or worse.

The other main characters also bring with them hints of magic: Harp is the only farmer in Nebraska whose crops were not decimated by the Black Sunday dust storm that is dissipating as this epic novel opens. His niece, Dell, believes she may share the Antidote’s gift and could use it as she drives her basketball team to a state championship. Photographer Cleo has been sent by the government to document the storm but, when she switches cameras, finds that she’s capturing unseen images that unnerve and inspire her.

As in “Swamplandia,” Russell writes about fantastical events with plainspoken prose that makes us accept them surprisingly easily. The Antidote, for instance, does seem to have supernatural powers, but don’t gifted therapists, too? Both listen to the troubles of others and try to help them envision a path forward. The mysterious photos seem to be recapturing the past but maybe they’re just reminding us not to forget our history?

Some sort of magic seems to be required, in any case, since Uz, the fictional town where “Antidote” is set, is bedeviled not just by dust storms but by a tyrannical sheriff and a series of murders that the sheriff has pinned on an innocent young man.

There’s a lot going on in “The Antidote” and one thing that happens because Russell takes her time is that her themes emerge gracefully — from the characters themselves, many of whom have back stories that echo each other. Cleo, who is Black, comes from people who were ripped from their homeland. Harp, who is Polish, came to America to escape the Germans who ripped his people from their home. Both now live on land stolen from, as the Antidote puts it, “the Pawnee, the Ponca, the Otoe and Missouria, the Lakota, the Dakota, the Iowa, the many people who were living here long before my family became Americans.”

Eventually, Harp learns that very theft is what his father deposited in the Antidote (“It is very possible to live in a house built from stolen timber without thinking of oneself as a thief. For years, I did this.”). Learning this helps convince Harp that the dust storms may be a punishment and that it will require dramatic action to heal both the land and his people’s hearts.

Are we ready to take action? “The Antidote” asks. Do we have in us the fortitude to realize that what seems to be magic or catastrophe is really the Earth telling us what she needs?

The Antidote

By: Karen Russell.

Publisher: Knopf, 407 pages, $30.