“The Antidote,” Karen Russell’s first novel in 14 years, is framed by two real-life events in Nebraska back in 1935 – a devastating dust storm and a Biblical-level flood that was accompanied by a tornado.
But on the pages in between, the story focuses on the town locals. These include some you might expect, a local farmer and his feisty orphaned niece, and some you might not: There’s a Vault, or prairie witch, who absorbs people’s secrets into her body as well as a photographer who inexplicably captures the past and the future in her pictures.
Russell’s first novel, the mesmerizing, Pulitzer Prize-finalist “Swamplandia,” also featured otherworldly touches but relied as much on the magical mystical world of the Everglades to augment the atmosphere. It also had a lot to say about America, “about fantasy versus reality, capitalist expansion, colonial violence and willful amnesia,” Russell said during a video interview from her Oregon home.
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In “The Antidote,” the magic is more central, enhanced by the presence of a witch, a scarecrow, a tornado and the strategic use of words like “emerald” and the town being named Uz. Russell says she loves in “The Wizard of Oz” how “strangers form this unlikely family and change together,” which is true here, too. But she notes that Uz actually comes from the Book of Job in the Bible, which is also an influence on her work.
The book shares the same political concerns as “Swamplandia” but here they are laid bare like the topsoil destroyed by years of misguided farming tactics in the book. “A lot of people I grew up with, myself included, didn’t have the tools to understand the cost of their own lives to their ecosystems and to other people,” Russell says about how the characters here gradually come to see the toll the blinders they wore has taken on minorities and the less fortunate.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You juggle a big cast of characters, magical realism and a reexamination of American history. Plus, the Wizard of Oz. What was the seed that started this?
I was finishing “Swamplandia” a thousand years ago, when I was a young woman with a poreless face, and I wanted to write my next novel. I got this image of a woman holding up one of those antique earhorns and some guy was whispering a secret to her. I thought of these women I call prairie witches, who absorb memories for people – usually something you can’t bear to know anymore – that’s disrupting your life.
That felt universal – I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t be tempted to tear out some pages of their life story and put them on the shelf. But that was all I knew and I could never find my way into the book.
What I love about novels is that you can have multiple worlds that overlap and more time to get to know and care about people. With a short story, it can feel perverse – it’s like the circus comes to town and you set up this whole world and then you say, “Thanks for coming. We’re gone tomorrow.”
But novels are harder to hold in your head than short stories. When I was failing to write this book, I thought, “I’m actually not a novelist. I just write stories.”
By the pandemic, I was this haggard mother of two and we had these terrible wildfires in Portland where you couldn’t go outside. This room is now a serene office, but it used to be our nursery and I was putting towels around the windows because of the smoke and it became a bridge back to this story.
It is a big canvas. I sent it to my dad who said, “Oh, Karen, when are you going to write those short stories again?”
Q. Besides the violence and colonization and the denying of reality, both novels also deal with grief and the loss of a mother and of land and home. Were you conscious of those connections?
I’m truly the last to know. It’s sort of embarrassing how deep into a draft I’ll get before I have any clue. It’s a funny thing to try to court this experience of letting the story get a little bit away from me, developing momentum to take me somewhere I don’t fully understand in a first draft. That’s what’s powerful about fiction. You kind of have to disarm yourself first – my waking mind wouldn’t even know how to get to some of these coordinates.
If I wrote this story as straight history without the magic, the stakes are so enormous that I’d be self-conscious about getting it right. This novel goes to some pretty frightening and messy places that honestly, I wouldn’t be able to just sit down and decide to write about.
Q. Are we shortsighted and misguided in the way we treat other people, and the land, because of human nature, or is it the myth of American individualism, or the structures of unregulated capitalism?
These are my questions, too. We have an economy that pushes people down and gives financial incentives to go on destroying things. I don’t think it’s our nature. We are this amazing species that gets to tell stories about what we are, which changes how we understand ourselves. People are capable of so much goodness, so I reject a reductive view of us.
Q. The erasing of memories in your book is both personal and political. Were you concerned about balancing the characters and story with the political themes?
More than anything I’ve written, this book is overtly political and that really was a decision. I think this has a real intention that’s pretty evident, but I really hope it works as a novel, too.
I could not have anticipated the context that I’d be launching this book into. The book has a section called “The Counterfeiters,” about counterfeiting fantasies that substitute for history. Watching the way Russia is being recast is terrifying – it is happening right in front of us, a heinous case of a revision that serves power.
These strategic attacks on knowledge and memory are tragic – they’re happening right now but there’s a section in the book about the Indian boarding schools, which were designed to wipe out whole cultures. Some of these losses are irreversible and it was a challenge of this book to hold both notes – the grief over the reality that a lot has been lost, but also the idea that a lot can be recovered.
There’s a warranted reason for dismay right now, and it’s harder for many of us to imagine a caretaking society or how we can turn this Leviathan around. But a friend said we all do have to act as if this is possible because if we don’t, it’s not. It’s not that it’s harder but that it feels more necessary to me that we try because if you do get stuck in the cul-de-sac of cynicism, which is very seductive.
But writing this book helped me, talking to real people doing good work – it nourished my imagination when I visited my friend’s farm where she practices regenerative agriculture.
My friend Maureen McLane, who’s a poet, said, “I want to resist apocalyptic anxiety without denying reality.” But that can be a narrow lane to navigate between.