Although it takes place on the Nebraska plains during the Dust Bowl era, Karen Russell’s The Antidote speaks to our present ecological crisis. Russell’s big-hearted and bewitching ensemble piece takes place on godforsaken ground: the Sandhills of western Nebraska, where a clutch of hardy farmers struggle to sustain themselves on prairie land that has been desiccated by sandstorms and drowned in flood waters.
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Blending gothic elements of the supernatural with historical events, The Antidote is a novel of retrieval and forgetting, a cautionary tale that asks hard questions about how Americans view their own history, the stubbornness of myth and the collective burden of a population that has been sold a phony version of the American Dream.
The Miami native had been pondering the idea ever since the publication of her stunning debut Swamplandia! in 2011. The Antidote shares that book’s preoccupation with American hucksterism, the neat and tidy stories that can mask so much ugliness underneath.
The Globe asked Russell about how tragedies are twisted into success stories, the dangers of photography and how her love of basketball found its way into her novel.
The Antidote is such an immersive novel, and so deeply rooted in history. Where did the idea come from?
I got the idea when I was writing my first novel, Swamplandia!; I applied for a fellowship with it. And I just couldn’t make it work. But I wrote a lot of short stories that, in retrospect, circle around some of the same questions that are addressed in The Antidote. They were almost rehearsals, in a way.
The character of the Prairie Witch is so fascinating. She is the keeper of the town’s secrets, hopes, fears – the repository of its collective memory.
I had this initial image I imagined in my mind’s eye, of a woman who was holding an antique ear horn that looked like a big flower, and of somebody whispering into it, and she was just absorbing this into her body. This idea of subjects that people want to exile from their waking minds. Like how people become this fleshy insulation system for these genuinely nightmarish costs of a winner-take-all economy that seeks to turn everything into profit.
What kind of research was involved? You evoke the Nebraska plains with such vividness and clarity of detail. Did you spend a lot of time there?
I went out to Nebraska a couple of times. I went on a research trip, really over a decade ago, with the pilot and photographer Doug Dean, who lives near Rushville, which is the western part of the state. James Riding, who co-founded the Indian Studies Program at Arizona State, was also a great and essential resource.
Nebraska is such a contrast to Miami, where you were raised.
There is a connection between the Everglades and the Sandhills, in that they are both intact ecologies that have been reduced to a fraction of their original size. The Sandhills are like a museum of what the prairie once was.
Karen Russell says she had been thinking about the idea behind The Antidote ever since the publication of her stunning debut Swamplandia! in 2011.Annette Hornischer/Supplied
Your character Cleo Allfrey is a photographer who works for the Resettlement Administration, which was created during the New Deal, and she is given a very specific assignment, which is to valorize the farmers, make them appear stoic and noble.
I found myself reflecting on this a lot. How do these farmers’ accounts kind of crystallize? How does history coagulate, and how does the present coagulate into history? Photography has the pretense of objectivity. The photographers who documented life in the Plains were given shooting scripts, because there was this imperative to secure support for the New Deal, and to maintain the RA’s funding.
Your book explores a crucial aspect of the Dust Bowl that has largely been ignored in traditional historical accounts, which is the Native American genocide, and the legacy of colonial violence that continued well beyond the Dust Bowl period.
I talked to James Riding, and one of the things that he really stressed to me was the inaccuracies in the historical record about this period. I mean, colonial violence was completely omitted. I was speaking with someone about the character of Sheriff Iscoe in my book, who is this horrible, racist, violent monster, and how perhaps he is a bit hyperbolic. Read today’s headlines! He is a man in power who is creating his own narrative for his own self-gain.
Asphodel Oletsky, the Nebraska teenager who acts as a kind of moral conscience in the story, is a fierce basketball player, the captain of her team. Are you a basketball fan?
Oh yeah; my husband helped me with that. He saw Dell as being something like Chris Paul. I was thinking a lot about Captain Ahab and Moby Dick – this monomaniacal drive, and how that can become all-encompassing if you don’t remember that other people are real, that is this a game. I was also thinking about what we celebrate as virtuous in America.
Have we learned any lessons from the Dust Bowl? Or are we still the victims of cultural amnesia?
I mean, we have lost so much fertility in our soils. It is a real global bankruptcy, stripping all that out of the soil. But it’s still happening. People in our economy are really encouraged to accumulate as much as they can for their direct descendants. I can’t judge these farmers, many of whom are destitute, and often don’t own the land. People are pushed by fear and debt.
But I think we are also starting to ask: How can we feed ourselves differently, or live together differently? We need to take these questions seriously. I mean, do we really want to colonize Mars? Elon Musk’s space fleet can’t be the only solution. But I do think people are asking these hard questions, and we’re starting to see a countervailing narrative emerging.
