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Harp Oletsky’s first memory is from his sixth birthday. His father steers him into the center of a jack drive: Dozens of men have corralled hundreds of jack rabbits into a pen. The jack rabbits have wreaked havoc on the already-suffering Nebraskan crops. “Worse than locusts,” his father says.
The women and girls are allowed to squeal and cry from the pen’s perimeter as the rabbits are exterminated, but the men are focused and dutiful, though some are caught with evil joy in their eyes as they aim for skulls. Harp’s father says, “You cannot be softhearted, Harp” as he hands his screaming young son a club.
Luckily for Harp, this is a memory he will be able to later erase. Luckily for the people of Uz, Nebraska, there is the Prairie Witch.
Nearly four decades later, the Prairie Witch has set up shop in Uz with a sign that reads “THE ANTIDOTE OF UZ! NOW ACCEPTING DEPOSITS!” It’s the heart of the Great Depression, and the Witch is one of the only people making money in her Dust Bowl-obliterated region. So what exactly is she the antidote to? At first she’s advertised as the cure to “every ailment from heartburn to nightmares.” But the Witch’s customers all come to be cured of something much more complicated: the lasting, often damaging, effects of their own memories.
The Prairie Witch gives each customer a deposit slip and has them read its number into her ear horn. The Witch goes into a trance as her customers share their memories. Some folks just want to savor the beautiful memory of the first time they had a soda, or of their first kiss. They’ll plan on coming back later to retrieve their deposit, take it back when they need it. But most folks come to rid themselves of memories that devastate and shape their lives. Or, in some cases, memories that might make them an unbiased participant in court or in an upcoming election.
But any resource can be used for good, or corruption.
When the infamous Black Sunday storm of 1935 wipes out crops across the Great Plains, the Prairie Witch experiences a wiping of her own. She can no longer feel her customer’s memories, which for years had lived in her body. What will happen if her customers want to retrieve their memories? Will she be seen as a fraud? Will her life be at risk?
The Antidote (Knopf, 352 pages, $30) is the latest novel by Portland author Karen Russell (Swamplandia!, Saint Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves). It features a cast of five intersecting characters whose lives are irreversibly changed by different aspects of the Dust Bowl’s devastation and who each seek a bold way forward. In addition to the Prairie Witch, we meet Asphodel Oletsky, a 15-year-old girl who goes to live with her Uncle Harp after her mother’s mutilated body is found in a ditch. There is Uncle Harp, whose wheat field is the only crop standing—and, somehow, thriving—after the storm. Soon, Harp starts seeing things that make him feel like he’s losing his mind: the Scarecrow, for example, that remained mysteriously undamaged in the storm—and who becomes one of the story’s narrators. The Scarecrow’s first chapter features a photo of it in an otherwise obliterated field along with two simple sentences: “I was not annihilated. Whatever ‘I’ was.”
The fifth character is a photographer named Cleo Allfrey, a Black woman who is hired by the government to introduce “America to Americans” after the storm. Any time she offers photographs of Black people affected by the Dust Bowl, they are shuffled to the bottom of the pile or destroyed. Cleo’s white bosses remind her they are also making advertisements for Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. “We knew the faces that carried the most weight with Congress. The need that triggered avalanches of compassion was white need.”
What makes this novel so incredible is the way Russell can take such a sprawling, Steinbeckian story and infuse it so intricately with the politics of the time (which painfully parallel those in which we are living). Antidote examines political parallels that are long-standing instabilities of the country: poorly managed land, income and racial inequality, even women’s sports and, ultimately, how our governments and media manipulate each of these areas in order to tell whatever story that will appease the decision-makers and their own egos.
But with each of these aspects of the story, Russell is never heavy-handed. The Antidote is gorgeous and inventive storytelling, literature at its finest.
GO: Karen Russell in conversation with Emily Chenoweth at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, powells.com. 7 pm Tuesday, March 11. Free.