The latest novel from Karen Russell, author of the highly acclaimed Swamplandia!, is set in a 1930s Nebraska town called Uz, after the home of the biblical Job. The name is apt; it’s the time of the Dust Bowl, when the Great Plains states of the US suffered drought and colossal dust storms that blighted agriculture and turned a generation of farmers into climate refugees.
The book has four protagonists, all with some connection to uncanny powers. The Antidote of the title is a “prairie witch” with the ability to take away people’s unwanted memories and hold them against the day the owner is ready to remember. Harp Oletsky is a farmer who finds his land is miraculously spared from the catastrophic “Black Sunday” dust storm; in its wake, the sky is blue over his fields alone, and they fill with healthy wheat. His teenage niece, Dell, is dealing with the murder of her mother by obsessively playing basketball and apprenticing herself to the Antidote as a trainee witch. Cleo Allfrey is a black photographer, sent to Nebraska by the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration to document the suffering of farmers. She buys a camera in a local pawn shop that turns out to have uncanny powers of its own: its photographs show scenes from potential futures and forgotten pasts. The novel also has brief sections from the perspectives of a haunted scarecrow and a stray cat.
The great theme of The Antidote is deliberate amnesia – particularly that of white people about the ethnic cleansing of Native peoples that set the stage for the Dust Bowl. Under the care of the Pawnee, these prairies were lush, vibrantly living places, with crops and agricultural practices adapted to regional drought cycles; after the massacres and forced relocations that removed them, the topsoil has risen into the air as a vicious ghost that burns the eyes and lungs. Since this is magical realism, the storms aren’t just a physical consequence, but a haunting, a supernatural judgment on the people who inherited the fruits of a genocide. To heal, the community must first remember. The Antidote and Cleo Allfrey, with her haunted camera, are well positioned to kickstart this process.
The most salient quality of The Antidote is the beauty and power of Russell’s writing, especially in documenting horrors. Here is a jack drive, where rabbits are driven into an enclosure to be slaughtered as pests: “The rabbits are crying and dying, the clubs coming down, down, down … Grey skins are splitting, slipping under bootheels and wooden bats … Quiet comes at last. The men’s arms rest against their sides like tools in a shed. Women are hanging the dead jacks to dry by their long ears … Inside of you, the screaming continues.” The book also abounds in small delights such as, “Poor guitar! I sometimes stared, with sympathy, at the shocked hole in its centre,” or this description of trying to silence a guilty conscience: “The thought was like a loose knot I had to keep retying.”
There are, however, two weaknesses that rob the book of much of its potential power. First, the plot is frustratingly scattered. Developments that initially seem crucial are left with no resolution; a narrative about the string of murders that included the killing of Dell’s mother is especially odd, as we’re asked to just stop caring about it midway through the book. Many scenes are devoted to Dell’s basketball career, while the crimes against Natives on which the story turns happen entirely off stage. Through this, Russell is easily good enough to keep us engaged. No writer, however, could be good enough to make it a feature and not a bug.
Second, Russell’s narrators seem more like 21st-century liberals than rural citizens of 1930s Nebraska. The white protagonists start out anti-racist, then go through an awakening that has them devoting their lives to atoning for their historical complicity in genocide. Meanwhile, they never worry about feeding themselves, though it’s unclear how this is possible for the Oletskies, since Harp is a no-yield farmer with huge debts to the bank, and his new miracle crop hasn’t yet been sold. Some elements feel jarringly anachronistic: Dell plays on an integrated girls’ basketball team, and when she falls in love with a teammate, she understands and embraces what she’s feeling without any panic or dissonance about the implications of being gay. There is no sense that Cleo Allfrey’s status as a black female photographer makes her an almost unbelievable exception to every rule. She also never seems culturally black, which, in the heavily segregated 1930s, calls for an explanation that is never forthcoming. While such fudging of history can work in some contexts (Bridgerton being an obvious example), it feels inappropriate in a work of political fiction about the moral imperative to accurately remember the past even when it makes us uncomfortable.
The Antidote is clearly the work of a writer with prodigious gifts. But every novelist with a long enough career will ultimately produce a book where they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, or chewed and swallowed something they should have spat out. Despite The Antidote’s laudable ambitions and interesting conception, I’m afraid, for Russell, this is that book.
• The Antidote is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99) on 13 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, buy your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
