Aridity of the Soul
A Review of
The Antidote: A Novel
Karen Russell
Hardcover: Knopf, 2025
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Reviewed by Amy Merrick
Karen Russell gravitates to the forces that burden us but also make us who we are: time, family, loss, memory. Her highly anticipated second novel, a follow-up to the 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist Swamplandia!, unfolds during the epic Great Plains drought and is shaped by two real-life events in 1930s Nebraska, the Black Sunday dust storm and the flooding of the Republican River, which swelled with two feet of rain in a single day. The setting is the fictional town of Uz, a fitting echo of The Wizard of Oz but also, more directly, a reference to the biblical homeland of Job.
Four characters share the story, with the first-person point of view rotating among them. The title character and the most intriguing, a woman who calls herself the Antidote, has the gift of absorbing people’s memories through a type of confession that leaves no trace—on her or on the speaker—and demands no restitution. She issues deposit slips for the memories to be redeemed at a later date. “A prairie witch’s body is a room for rent,” the Antidote muses. “A vault to store the things people cannot stand to know, or bear to forget . . . Their dead were alive inside me, patiently waiting to be recollected.”
The Antidote longs for a reunion with her son, who was taken from her at birth in a home for unwed teenage mothers. Russell explores the historical injustice of this practice, and many others, through detailed research and attention to the ways in which women’s lives and stories are erased. Another character trapped in the institution whispers, “God must be a man, or how could She stand this?”
Later, a reluctant Antidote gains an apprentice: Asphodel Oletsky, an orphan who is being raised by her uncle, Harp, and who sleeps in her dead mother’s childhood bedroom. A transient teenager has been framed for the murder of Dell’s mother by a one-dimensional villain, Sheriff Vick Iscoe, who needs a political victory to boost his re-election campaign. Dell struggles to relate to her uncle (“Whatever is happening here, I am alone with it,” she tells herself) but is infinitely loyal to her all-girl basketball team. She and the Antidote quickly bond—a child without a mother drawn to a mother without a child.
Harp, meanwhile, is perplexed by his niece and embarrassed that his fields are the only ones that have been spared from the choking dust killing his neighbors’ crops and sending them fleeing from Uz. As he meditates nightly on this miracle, his understanding gradually changes,
“I’d started to realize that I’d been asking my questions from the wrong position—from the center of the field. Imagining, like Job before me, that I was at the heart of the mystery. What did the whirlwind do to Job? It spun him around to see the breadth of the earth. Forests and mountains, rivers and stars. Whales, crocodiles, hippos, eagles. The storehouse of the snows. The green womb of water. Suddenly Job could hear the voice of God everywhere—not only in the whirlwind, but in all creation.”
Harp has an interior transformation, crucial to the plot, as he recognizes that his own family, displaced themselves from Poland, knowingly displaced the Pawnee families already living in Nebraska. His growing awareness is aided by the Antidote’s gift and by the work of Cleo Allfrey, a Black photographer sent to document the effects of the Dust Bowl, whose camera has a magical way of revealing more than the eye can see.
Russell’s lyricism is memorable, as always, and one of this novel’s strengths. She writes sweeping descriptions of vast landscapes, as in this vision from the Antidote overlooking Harp’s fields, “I see something growing on the fallowland: a great wave of illumination that begins to rise from the soil and take shape, tasseling light and ripening light and hardening kernels of light. It lifts and sprawls into a single trembling sheet, stretching high above the barn, burning in a color I have never seen. Pulsing like the aura around the moon.”
The disappointment of The Antidote is that Russell seems to know where she wants to go but not exactly how to get there. Her themes are weighty and worthy, but there are too many of them, and so they remain underdeveloped. Her love of action and magical realism steers her toward crafting maximalist set pieces, too madcap and zany at times, at the expense of character development. The climax of the book features a complex deus ex machina that fixes some immediate problems but leaves important ones dangling, never to be addressed. Other sections feel better suited to a nonfiction history of white settlement of the Plains and the violent removal of Native people from their homes—a book I would read with interest, but a different book.
In the denouement of the novel, for readers who choose to stick with it, Russell’s ideas do come together, in a fashion, to reveal more of her purpose. The resolution that arrives for the Antidote is surprising, moving and beautifully written. It is a reminder of Russell’s motif, both here and in Swamplandia!, of the great mysteries of life and the afterlife. Reading the author at her best highlights that more of this depth is needed throughout the rest of the book.
Once the swirling of the storm ceases, the Dust Bowl is revealed to be a metaphor for an aridity of the soul, redeemed only by a change of heart, a willingness to face the past, a determination to be generous and to seek human connection. It is a decision that brings relief and a kind of salvation.
The Antidote is an imperfect vehicle. But it may prompt readers, as it did for me, to reflect on the role of memory—what is cherished, what is distorted and what is denied—and the responsibility and blessing of developing empathetic imagination for others.
Amy Merrick
Amy Merrick is a senior professional lecturer in journalism at DePaul University in Chicago. She is also a freelance writer and editor, and a longtime member of the Religion in Literature book group at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, Illinois. She is on Threads at @amyjmerrick
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