The Antidote by Karen Russell clocks in at 424 pages, including a land acknowledgement, photo credits, author notes, and general acknowledgments. A sprawling novel, The Antidote is difficult to whittle down into a simple plot description, but the titular character is what’s known as a prairie witch, a person who can store information in her body like a vault and give it back when the secret-giver returns with his/her receipt. Some people store horrible memories so they can breathe easier; others deposit good memories to bring back later, perhaps after they would have naturally forgotten a beautiful moment decades later.
Russell’s setting is 1935 in Nebraska after a violent dust storm known as Black Sunday, and later the flooding of nearby Republican River. A sprawling story, the list of characters is vast, the timeline shifts to flashbacks, the points made (climate change, oppression, treatment of unwed mothers, stolen land, racism, political corruption, Queerness, disability, animal plagues, sexual assault, etc.) are numerous, and the writing is poetic. If an author leaves out any person/group, is the book not worthy? It feels like Russell’s answer is a nervous gulp on the page.
For all of the above reasons, I did not finish The Antidote, though I did get to page 317. I saw a comment on The Storygraph that suggests Russell writes as if she’s gunning for The Booker Prize because she didn’t win with a previous entry, and it makes sense to me. Every hot issue is there in the novel, causing it to bloat. For example, in Nebraska the local tribes had their land stolen to make way for newly settled white families, some refugees from Poland persecuted by Germans. Thus, Russell writes a flashback from a Polish man’s point of view, describing his family under German rule, moving to the U.S., and the watching the Native tribes persecuted while he remained silent.
Perhaps Russell worried that she would be called out for writing from the point of view of a Native character when she herself is not, but there is also the risk of ignoring the presence of Native tribes in Nebraska, too. Therefore, I never read a Native character from his/her own point of view. It seems like trying really hard to cover all her protentional reader complaints. On the other hand, I could be wrong; Russell writes from the perspective of a black woman, a photographer hired by the US government to take photos of resettlement efforts as a form of propaganda.
If you Google online, you’ll see the list of characters is impressive, and many get their own points of view: the Antidote prairie witch, the photographer, a farmer magically unaffected by the dust storm, the farmer’s niece, a scarecrow, etc. That’s not so many, yet these characters have flashbacks that tell the story of other people. For instance, the Antidote remembers her time in a home for unwed mothers and explains the backstories of some of the girls there. When the farmer collects a memory his father deposited with another prairie witch, we get that back story. I found myself skimming the secondhand stories because I understood the point was to make a point.
Right around 300 pages, I realized I didn’t want to keep reading. I’m not into sprawling narratives because the more interesting parts get delayed, and it feels more protective than genuine. If Russell doesn’t include everything, someone would make noise about erasure and white privilege. To be honest, I’m making assumptions, but fiction is not meant to be read as a historical text, and as the focus widened, the story’s strength waned.
Lastly, although the narrators were in first-person point of view, they all sounded the same: poetic. In one moment, the Antidote notes that the farmer is writing a speech and wants her feedback because he can’t spell. A few pages later, from the farmer’s point of view, he notes, “Outside the window, Venus was a brilliant pinprick over the wheat fields. Its color shifted as I stared, from violet to sapphire to red. Gem-like sparkles reached my old eyes from the depth of space.” I’m not saying that a lack of education means a lack of intelligence, but this is a dust bowl farmer who likely did not receive many years of education, and here he understands planets, that light travels from space, gems, etc.
I’m curious what my book club will have to say about this book — the meeting is a few hours away, and I wanted to write my thoughts before we had our discussion.
