The last thing a woman who stores other people’s memories wants to feel is weightless.
She wakes in a jail cell while a dust storm overwhelms the Nebraska town of Uz. Something has changed inside her. For fifteen years she has taken deposits: things her neighbors cannot endure remembering, things they cannot bear to lose. Now the deposits are gone. Her strangely light body is the first indication that a business has failed.
This is the predicament in the publisher’s opening extract from Karen Russell’s The Antidote. The woman calls herself the Antidote. She is a prairie witch, a profession in which a person can rent space inside herself to someone else. Customers leave memories with her and can later withdraw them. During the transaction she enters a trance; afterward, she knows as little about the contents as a vault knows about its valuables.
The arrangement offers a seductive compromise. You have not destroyed your past. You have put part of it somewhere safe until you feel able to carry it again.
Then Black Sunday comes. Outside the cell, farms and livelihoods are disappearing into the storm. Inside, another kind of savings has vanished. The witch will have to face people who paid for something she may no longer be able to return. A magical premise has acquired the extremely practical problem of an angry customer.
The woman behind the promise
The opening’s bodily detail is immediately compelling. Stored memories have pressure and weight even when the Antidote cannot inspect them. After their disappearance, lightness feels frightening. The familiar burden was also how she knew herself.
Her name promises relief, but her circumstances offer little evidence of ease. She needs to make a living. Her customers must trust her, while the local sheriff can threaten her. People who depend on her services can still regard her with contempt. Her usefulness has not brought security.
That contradiction gives the premise somewhere to go beyond the cleverness of memory storage. A deposit creates a relationship, even if the point of the transaction is to stop thinking about something. There is payment, an undertaking, and the expectation of a future return. What feels like a private withdrawal from the past can become another person’s obligation.
The witch has a past of her own. In her conversation with Jane Ciabattari for Literary Hub, Russell describes Antonina Rossi as a mother who remains in Uz hoping that her lost son will find her. Her ability to keep other people’s memories sits beside a loss she continues to remember.
This is a more interesting figure than her grand professional name initially suggests: a woman offering a remedy while living with something it cannot remedy for her. The name is a sales pitch as well as an aspiration. Russell discusses its extravagant promise in the same interview, along with the costs of burying what people need to understand about their lives.
There is room here for a reader’s hesitation, too. Anyone who has wanted a little distance from a painful memory can understand the appeal of her trade. In Scott Simon’s NPR interview, Russell acknowledges that we cannot keep the whole of our past continuously present. The sharper question is what becomes unavailable along with the pain: a possibility, a responsibility, a means of understanding why life has taken this shape.
His wheat is still growing
While the Antidote discovers that she has lost too much, Harp Oletsky discovers that he has retained an inexplicable amount. His crops survive when those of his neighbors do not. His wheat continues growing in a landscape that offers no convincing reason for growth.
In the Ciabattari interview, Russell describes the farmer’s strange good fortune as a source of fear. The idea has immediate force. A blessing can become difficult to inhabit when everyone around you is suffering. The intact field feeds Harp, but it also makes him conspicuous. Why should this patch of ground be spared?
The historical setting helps that question feel physical. Black Sunday was the great dust storm of April 14, 1935; Uz is invented. The novel places an impossible harvest inside a recognizable catastrophe, where weather and ruined soil have destroyed the ordinary connection between work and reward. You do not need to solve the mystery to imagine the unease of looking over the fence.
Harp is also learning to live with his niece, Dell, whose mother, his sister, has been murdered. The two have lost the same person without acquiring the same language for the loss. Being related gives them a household; it does not immediately tell them how to share it.
Dell has her own urgent concerns. She captains a basketball team and wants to learn the prairie witch’s craft. Basketball is a particularly welcome detail among storms, murders, and magic. It gives her teammates, ambitions, habits, and reasons to be impatient. There are still things a girl wants to accomplish this week.
The contrast between a game’s rules and grief’s disorder is one possible way to approach her determination. But the game also deserves to remain a game: something she cares about, not simply an illustration of the thing that has happened to her.
A talking scarecrow further disturbs the farm’s apparent boundaries. Even the object usually left standing in the background has a voice. Russell’s cast invites us to look around rather than settle too quickly on one person as the owner of everything the town might mean.
A photograph of the wrong moment
Cleo Allfrey arrives with a different assignment. A Black photographer working for a New Deal government project, she has been sent to document rural poverty. Where the witch receives experiences people want removed from daily consciousness, the photographer tries to make circumstances visible to people elsewhere.
Her camera complicates the assignment. Its pictures do not reliably show the instant at which she pressed the shutter. They can reveal the past or possible futures. She has an image in front of her without necessarily knowing which world it belongs to.
In her BOMB conversation with the composer Missy Mazzoli, Russell discusses both this invention and the historical photographs incorporated into the book. Some of those real images have holes punched through their negatives. Roy Stryker, who directed the documentary project that inspired Cleo’s assignment, used a hole punch to reject pictures.
The holes make selection visible. A camera was there; somebody made an image; another person decided against its circulation. What survives in an archive is shaped by more than the moment of exposure. Russell also discusses the political pressures that favored particular kinds of subjects, including the greater usefulness of images of white farmers in attracting support.
That history gives Cleo’s work a difficulty no technical improvement can remove. She wants the people in her photographs to matter to distant viewers. The viewers may prefer a more convenient image of suffering than the lives in front of her can provide.
The magical camera opens a further gap. A field has a history before its present owner begins counting his losses. Looking at the ground through a different time can disturb the assumption that a disaster story begins with the disaster. Someone may already be absent from the picture we were taught to recognize.
This is the most intriguing connection between the two occupations. The witch’s customers deliberately set memories aside. The photographer works within arrangements that decide what will be available to remember. One exchange happens inside a body, another through images that travel. Both give the question of memory a material life.
Room for the people, and the sentences
These premises suggest a novel for readers who enjoy an invented world pressing closely against an ordinary one. Magic has customers and working conditions. A thriving crop affects a farmer’s standing with his neighbors. A girl can be interested in witchcraft and still have a basketball team to worry about.
The public opening also offers a direct taste of Russell’s prose. The Antidote searches her body for what is missing; the atmosphere outside seems to acquire a body of its own. Weight, breath, marrow, and wind turn an abstract loss into something that can be felt. It is worth trying a few pages for the movement of the sentences before deciding how interested you are in the larger mysteries.
The abundance has possible drawbacks. In her Chicago Review of Books review, Malavika Praseed praises the imagination and prose while finding that some narrative threads disperse the book’s force. She also questions passages of concentrated argument that slow its later movement. That is a useful qualification for anyone expecting a single, steadily tightening mystery.
The invitation offered by the opening and these conversations is more expansive: spend time with several people whose needs do not neatly coincide, in a place where even the ground cannot be taken for granted.
The dust has changed what Uz looks like. One woman is trying to understand the empty space inside her. One farmer is trying to understand what has been left standing. A photographer is waiting to see which moment will appear in the developing image. Before asking what lesson connects them, it is worth wanting to know what each will do next.