Karen Russell, The Antidote (Knopf 2025)
6 stars–best book I’ve read in months, absolutely top-quality literature
Harp’s earliest memory is the killing of the jackrabbits, crying and dying.
Orphaned—Dell’s mother Lada ran away with ‘a roustabout’ and got murdered—she has come to live with Uncle Harp in Uz, Nebraska, in the middle of the Depression and a four-year drought. It is an ‘edgeless prairie’ where ‘cored cottonwood trees told a millennial story written in wavy circles’, plagued with grasshoppers, locusts, jackrabbits and indigo beetles.
‘The Antidote’ is a career prairie witch, a ‘bank’ for her customers’ ‘deposits’—memories, sins and secrets. But like the dust storms washing away the prairie, she finds herself empty, bankrupt like the farmers around her, facing her customers’ fury.
She recounts the daily occurrences in Uz in a unique Voice. Other chapters pass the narration to Dell, Harp, the government photographer or ‘the Scarecrow’, sometimes aided by the town gossip, Dottie. In the face of catastrophic weather, urban legends abound. The unorthodox way of expressing things lends unmistakable personality to the narration.
Dell’s chapters are a charming child’s-eye-view. This provides useful distance, as if it had been an adult telling the story, it would have been too bleak. Poignantly, the Antidote’s chapters address the son taken away from her at the Home for Unwed Mothers.
The mood is eerie, echoing the emptiness of the land, with a sadness due to the difficult circumstances, but tinged with wit. The desolation of the farmers, ‘like a dog trying to quench his thirst with his sweat’, is evocatively portrayed. We only gradually learn the nature of the magic she practices, Harp’s miraculous wheat or the photographer’s time-bending negatives, as Dell exposes her family’s and the whole town’s secrets. The beautiful writing and the atmosphere of mystery keep you wanting to read more.
Susie Helme 