Witches, storms, America – this novel is a mess

Telegraph

02-03-2025

It's the 1930s, Dust Bowl Nebraska. The town of Uz, named after the Biblical home of Job, has been all but destroyed by storms. 'The Antidote' – real name Antonia Rossi – is a 'prairie witch', who makes a living by relieving others of unwanted memories and 'storing' them in their bodies. (Customers are given a deposit slip and can retrieve them later.) But Rossi wakes up in the local prison to find her own 'vault' emptied, and as the town packs to leave, the farmers want their memories back. Rossi and her assistant Asphodel must cook up a plan to forge the stories she's lost. At the same time, when the sheriff, Rossi's long-term abuser, gets wind, he decides to use their ruse to his own nefarious ends.
That, however, is barely the half of it. In The Antidote, Karen Russell's first novel since the Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! in 2011, she populates her world with a large, engaging but ultimately unwieldy cast of narrators. In addition to Rossi, whose own past – she was robbed of her son in a home for 'unwed mothers' – is as important to the book as her present, other narrators include Asphodel, a young girl whose mother was recently murdered, supposedly by the very same 'Rabbit Foot Killer' the sheriff is after; Cleo Alfrey, a government-sponsored photographer whose pictures, hole-punched by her belittling editor, pop up throughout the text; and Harp, Asphodel's down-to-earth uncle, whose own fields, rippling with an unearthly, impossible colour, are the only ones unscathed by the storms of dust. And Asphodel has a regional basketball tournament to win – and she's in love with her best friend.
Unsurprisingly, even with 400 pages to work with, no single story has time to develop. The core themes – the hidden histories of women in the West, the destruction of the Native American world – build up, but it isn't clear who or what is driving the plot or why we're hearing from any one narrator at any one time. Some transitions are pure TV. 'You asked me once how I became a prairie witch,' Rossi tells Asphodel. 'I'm ready to tell you now, if you still want to know.'
More problematically still, every narrator sounds more or less the same, and more or less like a novelist. Rossi, Cleo, Asphodel, Harp and the rest are all capable of beautiful style ('waves of earth crashing over the prairie… the sky exhaling all her birds') and perfectly weighed aphorisms on the West's history ('Freedom turned out to be a territory we occupied'); but none sound like themselves. In the meantime, Russell's more unusual narrative tricks – Alfrey's photographs, or the poetry-delivering scarecrow in Harp's fields – are intriguing but underexplored.
Above all, for a book so concerned with the use and abuse of the stories we tell ourselves, Russell's prose shows remarkably little interest in the way memory feels. The work of the witches is a potent, overdetermined metaphor: customers make their 'deposits' by speaking into an antique 'ear horn' while the witch themselves drifts into a trance; in return, they receive a deposit slip, which if read back to the witch will retrieve the memory, though the witch has no notion of what is hidden in their body. In short, a rich invention. Yet when we encounter the process in the text, the experience is underwhelming: one crucial passage, in which a long-lost memory from a previous generation draws parallels between the 'devouring of the Poles' in 19th-century Prussia and the colonisation of Native America, reads like a textbook, complete with an exact quote from Bismarck. The events are shocking and the comparison is brave, but I learnt more than I felt.
The Antidote is a deeply-researched book about the power and importance of stories, but as a novel, it too often seems to lose its faith in the very medium in which it's working. At times it wants to be a history lesson, at times an eight-part series. Russell's narrators stop at every opportunity to answer questions that were already raised and might otherwise have been left hanging by her enchanted conceits – not least in the final, action-packed confrontation between storytellers, townsfolk and the sheriff. It all raises a question of its own: if novelists won't believe in the novel, who will?