Last month I finished Karen Russell’s latest novel, The Antidote, despite starting it in 2025. In my defense, it only took me so long to finish because I got overwhelmed with it the moment I started reading it. I’ve always been a huge fan of Karen Russell. She’s perhaps my biggest inspiration for writing and the source I return to over and over again when I think about how I’d like my writing to be some day.
Smarter reviewers than me describe The Antidote as a magical realism “American epic” set in the Dust Bowl era of America. It’s a tale about:
a struggling Nebraska town, post Dust Bowl
a child growing up without a mother
a mother growing up without a child
a witch who stores memories
a corrupt politician
a black photographer taking pictures of America for the government
a seemingly sentient scarecrow
the harms we enact on our neighbors
the promise of the American dream and where it falls short.
Russell has a way with words that is frankly astounding to me. I can see some people getting tired of the constant metaphors and dreamy atmosphere (it can, at times read like the worst of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop coalition) but I find her constant attention to detail and meaning so breathtaking that I routinely have to stop reading just to let the words sit with me.
Rather than try and diagnosis what the novel is about, I’m going to continue my tradition of simply sharing some of my favorite passages and sentences in hopes you’ll give it a read.
I might do two parts of this because it’s a pretty chunky book and I don’t want to overload this page with thousands of passages.
The rabbits are crying and dying, the clubs coming down, down, down. “If you ain’t gonna help, stay clear of us, boy—” You are six today. Your family will have a party after supper. The cake was cooling when you left for town. You feel sick thinking about it. Cherries come slopping out of the rabbits. Gray skins are splitting, slipping under bootheels and wooden bats.”
Comparing the cooked cherries of a cherry pie to the guts spilling under a horde of rabbits is…
“Memories are living things. When you house as many as I did, your bones begin to creak.”
“The land here is so flat that it’s easy to lose your bearings. When the sun begins to sink, even veteran Plainsmen consult their compasses. I’ve heard that it feels like being lost at sea. I have never seen the ocean, but I know what it means to live without landmarks.”
Russell does have an affinity for writing about the precocious child, which is probably why I gravitate to her writing so much.
“Full of days. That line always struck me. Even as a boy, I felt a heaviness when Papa read it. Some premonition of age. Old Uzians seemed as arid as the land to me, wrinkled and brittle.”
I doubt it’s just a coincidence that this novel is set in Uz, Nebraska. Uz and Oz, both are magical lands where strange things happen and scarecrows think.
“And where did ‘the tractor of the future’ get us? I buy my gas on credit. I’m still working to pay off that hungry machine”
Again, if Oz is the land of magic and technical marvels: clockwork machines that happily hum along and help the mighty wizard create his kingdom, Uz is the opposite. The Antidote really is about the ills of the modern era, how the continuation of American progress at all costs can detach us from the natural world, stripping our lands of the inherent magic they held and leaving our souls barren and void of both memory and love.
“Val’s brown eyes are actually plum-colored and veined with gold”
Just wow, what a way to describe eyes!
“Still, I won’t forget the true story of how my brother died. I won’t pay a prairie witch to put Frank out of my mind. He still draws breaths inside me. I do not want to lose my brother a second time.”
A central point of tension throughout The Antidote is the theme of what we willingly give up to avoid pain or keep living. The prairie witches aren’t bad or wrong, they offer a service that a lot of people take advantage of. Still, so many characters are willing to sever themselves from their past: erasing the memories of what they’ve done or what’s been done to them for the promise of a brighter and more stable future.
The characters we root for throughout the book don’t do this. They hold their memories close to their chest, almost too close, afraid to let go of their traumas—understanding that to do so would be to get rid of a central part of themselves. Harp here transforms later in the book but this is the central focus of his transformation, way before it even happens. He understands the pain of the past is important. He understands, like the other characters, that the past breathes within us, drawing breath, impacting our future. As long as we keep those memories of people within us, they still live.