Karen Russell's Dust Bowl 'Antidote' is even more ambitious than 'Swamplandia!'

It takes an unconventional fabulist to code thing truthful immense arsenic American history. Karen Russell is known for surreal storytelling and fantastic connection successful enactment marked by slanted position and outlandish scenarios which illuminate dormant truths. She’s brought her skills to carnivore connected acclaimed abbreviated fabrication collections and her 1 erstwhile novel, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist, “Swamplandia!” While that caller chronicled the diminution of a Floridian carnival household clinging to household fable and land, her caller novel, “The Antidote,” looks westward to the fictional Nebraska municipality of Uz during the 1930s.

Russell’s Uz is simply a desolate, ravaged Dust Bowl municipality wherever farmers person mislaid their crops and residents person perished acknowledgment to utmost weather. A drawstring of murdered women adds to the paranoia gripping the town.

Understandably, galore of its remaining residents fly this wasteland. Those near down are a hopeless lot: A renegade sheriff takes the instrumentality into his ain hands. Teenage girls find solace playing hoops connected a dwindling squad without a coach. Uncomfortably so, a bachelor second-generation husbandman finds himself with the lone thriving harvest successful town. And drunks find comfortableness astatine the barroom successful the Country Jentleman. Upstairs from the barroom successful the boarding house, mislaid souls confess their secrets to a prairie witch named the Antidote.

Their confessions are known arsenic deposits, implicit with a numbered slip. This transaction reduces the prairie witch into “a country for rent. A vault to store the things radical cannot basal to know, oregon bear. To forget.” Removed from the assemblage and yet an integral portion of it, the Antidote is an orphaned Sicilian migrant named Antonina Rossi who knows that “pain is ne'er immoderate 1 thing, it is ever moving.” This prairie witch’s root communicative is rooted successful the nonaccomplishment of her lone lad and flight from the abusive location for unwed mothers wherever she was forced to hold retired her gestation and springiness birth. All excessively acquainted with the psychic value of secrets, the Antidote remarks that “Memories are surviving things. When you location arsenic galore arsenic I did, your bones statesman to creak.”

The caustic quality of representation and secrets seizes Russell’s fascination. Historians and biographers enactment astir archival gaps to delicately stitch unneurotic suppressed histories, but fabrication writers tin instrumentality much originative liberties to reconcile the past. As past becomes much threatened by censorship, fabrication helps signifier nationalist discourse. Enter the caller relevance of humanities novels: Examples see Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” and Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” which each tackle expansive themes crossed contentious humanities periods. Most directly, “The Antidote” harkens to Eleanor Catton’s Booker grant winning “The Luminaries,” which centers astir the mysteries of a golden unreserved larboard municipality successful New Zealand. Both books are rife with enigma and the spoils of greed.

(Knopf)

All these books inquire their readers to juggle aggregate crippled threads and a cascade of characters. Their occurrence is babelike connected sustaining your fascination for secrets down the surface.

Big books marque tremendous demands: Readers thin to emotion them oregon hatred them. And portion Russell’s vocation took disconnected acknowledgment to the universally riotous praise for her abbreviated stories, I’d reason that she takes adjacent bigger risks successful her novels. They connection a much analyzable and frankincense greater reward. With crackling pastoral connection and thematic Lynchian undertones, “Swamplandia!” probed the increasing hostility successful Russell’s location authorities of Florida betwixt an endangered fecund wilderness and encroaching development. In it, her young heroine remarks, “At ten, I couldn’t articulate overmuch but I got the message: to beryllium a existent historian, you had to mourn amply and well.” Russell has taken these words to heart. With “The Antidote,” Russell raises the stakes of her efforts arsenic a novelist.

Gripped by the bequest of onshore theft and the forced migration of Native Americans, Russell constructed a caller underpinned by an elaborate embroidery of social, geological, historical, and biology probe connected the interaction of American Western expansion. She speaks to this extended enactment successful an author’s enactment and a onshore mislaid acknowledgment. Her prairie witch carries the motivation burdens of a bankrupt nine that shames women and strips the onshore of its resources arsenic good arsenic its autochthonal inhabitants, leaving small for those near behind.

Russell could person written a smaller, little ambitious, publication centered lone astir the Antidote and her contiguous clients. However, drafting from her skills arsenic a abbreviated communicative writer, she effortlessly weaves successful different characters whose unsocial gifts shed airy connected the lacunae of history. Cleo Allfrey is simply a WPA lensman and somewhat androgynous Black pistillate assigned to papers the West. Despite the strict guidelines that steer her enactment into the realm of propaganda, her enactment is thing beyond commercialized art. What develops successful the darkroom are visions that talk to the anticipation of a harmonious future, awesome to a prosperous past, and item contiguous horrors. The memories she captures are tangible successful ways that the Antidote’s are not. Each pistillate recognizes the mercurial powerfulness of memories. Together, they find sanctuary connected the lone unblemished farmland successful Uz, which belongs to Harp and Dell Oletsky.

If this sounds similar a dense novel, you’re lone halfway right. The publication is threaded with much subplots and histories arsenic good arsenic characters than I tin elaborate upon here. However, her crisp communicative grasp guides the scholar from quality to quality arsenic the publication unfolds. Russell’s vivid characters clasp an constituent of mystery, which speaks to the novel’s larger point. History makes wide the spread betwixt what we cognize and what we tin lone presume to beryllium true. Russell is astatine her strongest successful moments of intimacy — beryllium it maternal oregon conventionally romantic. There’s an awkward and unspoken enslaved betwixt her set of misfits. Independent of 1 another, they’re untethered and grossly misunderstood. As a unified front, they negociate to uncover the town’s astir sinister mysteries.

Harp, the lone antheral among this chosen crew, reflects: “Anything that is yours unsocial tin go a curse, adjacent bully fortune. This knowing deed maine with the unit of revelation. Words unsocial won’t bash it justice.” Russell works with imagined backstories and harsh facts to gully connections betwixt unexplained phenomena similar utmost upwind and inexplicable cruelty. Just arsenic Allfrey’s photographs were “crowded with lifetimes,” truthful is Russell’s novel, a enactment suffused with the “mystery of kindness” and the banality of violence.

LeBlanc is simply a committee subordinate of the National Book Critics Circle.