The Antidote
Fans of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will want to grab this gorgeous magical-realist novel set on the Nebraska prairie during the height of the Dust Bowl climate disaster. Russell, a MacArthur grant winner, is best known for her collections of short stories, and this is only her second novel after the 2012 Pulitzer finalist Swamplandia! It is well worth the wait, offering a ferociously moving meditation on America’s refusal to come to terms with the violence and injustice of its own past. The story begins on “Black Sunday,” April 14, 1935, when tornadic dust storms destroyed farmland throughout the Great Plains, and a variety of point-of-view characters lead the reader to an intimate understanding of the Great Midwestern Drought that decimated the farmlands of the American prairie and worsened the Great Depression.
The premise sounds grim, but Russell draws on some of our most enchanting national myths to bring these characters to life. The alert reader will quickly realize that yes, this novel is set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, in the depths of the Dust Bowl Depression, and yes, the inhabitants are menaced by dust tornados, and yes, the main characters are a scrappy orphan girl, a mysterious scarecrow, a stiff midwestern bachelor searching for love, and an exhausted prairie witch whose task it is to collect the toxic memories of her neighbors and store them away inside herself. But Russell’s evocations of L. Frank Baum’s American fairytale are subtle and never distract from the gritty, tender, fierce realism of this expansive story. The supernatural elements of the novel are infused with such a deep, compassionate humanity that the reader never has the sense that this is anything but a completely true story. Russell has created a masterpiece that will probably be on many 2025 award lists.
