Karen Russell's "The Antidote" Conjures An Uncanny Dust Bowl Tale
The "Swamplandia!" author's newest novel is full of Americana, magical realism and prairie witches.
DON’T TAKE THIS AS A NEGATIVE, but the first major scene in Karen Russell’s new novel, The Antidote, makes you feel like you’re suffocating.
In a jail cell in a Nebraska farm town called Uz, a woman experiences Black Sunday, the April day, 90 years ago this year, when the Dust Bowl got its name. A monstrous “black blizzard” of soil, stirred into the air by wind and drought, sweeps the southern Plains. It’s a pivotal moment in American history and art, of course, linked to mass migration to California, classic Steinbeck prose and Woody Guthrie songs. Dramatic settings don’t come much heavier.
“We all live under the hammer of the same weather,” as Russell puts it.
Russell’s terrified protagonist barely survives. As it turns out, that’s just the start of her troubles and the take-off point for a sprawling yarn. This story’s setting comes to life in high-definition: between insect swarms, broken tractors, Grange meetings and parched fields, the reader feels Uz like grit beneath the eyelids. The plot, meanwhile, goes to ominous, paranormal places, a world of supernatural “prairie witches” and a sentient scarecrow. (Uz versus Oz? Draw your own conclusions.)
THE WILDSAM QUESTIONNAIRE
WHAT SENSORY EXPERIENCE DO YOU MOST ASSOCIATE WITH YOUR HOMETOWN
Humidity. The sweaty embrace of the outer air in South Miami.
MOUNTAIN, DESERT OR SEA?
Sea.
WHERE WOULD YOU GOTO DISAPPEAR?
The Everglades.
GAS STATION SNACK OF CHOICE?
Does coffee count as a snack? You get so much bang for your buck with gas station coffee! I like the “Turbo” flavor. I’m also addicted to Extra Polar Ice gum. If you’ve tried to buy this flavor of gum at your gas station and it’s sold out, it’s probably my fault.
LIFE ADVICE YOU’VE NEVER FORGOTTEN?
“Do your best, and leave the rest. It will come right, some day or some night.” My mom used to say this to use very morning before school, and now I say it to our kids as they bravely put on their back packs and head out to face the day. It’s a line from Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.
In other words, this is a Karen Russell novel. The 43-year-old writer is perhaps best known for evoking her native Florida in her novel Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer finalist. Her acclaimed short stories often incorporate exuberant magic. In The Antidote, she plays all her cards, blending reality with fantasy, a vivid portrait of a place with surreal imaginative flights.
To weave it all together, she hit the road in the heartland.
“For a long time, I would joke that this book would be called Drylandia!,” she says. “With Florida, it’s just in my bones. For this book, I had to go to this very different, very arid region and learn about it.”
Research trips took her to the Pine Ridge country, to the town of Chadron and into Nebraska’s Sandhills, where the edgeless sky reminded her, strangely but strongly, of the Everglades. “In Nebraska, you feel like a clairvoyant of the weather. People would say, ‘Look at that storm rolling in. It’ll be here in two hours.’
Route 66
Roadside attractions, pie pit stops, Dust Bowl lore, motor lodges and more.
She did some of her roaming with James Riding In, a respected historian, cultural advocate and Pawnee Nation citizen, who helped her grapple with the territory’s deeper backstories. Diaries, letters and archival newspapers put her in touch with the vocabulary, daily lives and attitudes of 1930s Nebraska. She had so many conversations with present-day residents of that part of the world, she faced the classic writer’s agony of deciding which insights fit her story and which would end up on the cutting-room floor.
The result is an adventure in time and place, with a big cast of characters trying to survive cycles of boom and bust in a harsh landscape. “It was like a coin-flip, whether a homesteader would actually be able to prove up,” she says. “There was an imperative tot urn dirt into cash so quickly, planting things that don’t really grow well there.
Russell packs the book with people upagainst these challenges (and each other): Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Native and Black people; high-school basketball players, unwed mothers, traveling New Deal photographers, crooked cops, earnest farmers. And if some of those characters happen to possess unearthly powers ... that imaginative possibility doesn’t feel much more complicated than the real historical world Russell portrays.
The writer is based in Portland, Oregon, these days, far from the Dust Bowl. For a writer equally tuned into the world around her and the worlds she invents, everything’s material. Northwest wildfires helped her imagine Black Sunday’s dust storm, for example, and she detects parallels between open-minded Portland and the New Deal spirit of The Antidote’s era. But for this novel, she sees her characters and their battles tightly bound to the wide-open prairie and an epic, complicated time.
