The Antidote (3*)

I really, really wanted to like this novel--nominated for this year's National Book Award--more than I did.  While vividly imagined, it took more than three weeks to finish because author Karen Russell, seeking to redress the wrongs of American history, prioritized conceit over plot.  On a sentence level, however, she excels.  

The New Deal ran into old habits out here.

*  *  *  *  *

She looked up at me with the same huge, doomed eyes as those of the Herefords grazing on sand, staring into the future where they are meat and leather. 

*  *  *  *  *

If you had peered into the dormitory windows, you’d have seen twenty bellies heaving under the blue wool blankets, like a run of catfish swimming upriver to spawn.

*  *  *  *  *

The train was paused for a full day by the migrating buffalo. The great herd looked like a mountain in pieces, tumbling toward us. Hundreds flowed across the tracks. Horned beasts that rose a head above the tallest man in our party. Their thundering hooves rattled the car, their pungent stink filled our coats and our hair. We shrieked and gasped until we had exhausted our wonder.

Russell sets her Depression-era novel in Uz, a fictional midwestern town. It's one of several allusions to The Wizard of Oz, which she scatters like Easter eggs on a Taylor Swift alum. L. Frank Baum's children's classic serves as a kind of foundational American mythology, an alternative history from which to draw positive inspiration.  

Her prairie witches, including the title character, don't cast spells; they serve as "vaults" for the traumatic memories of immigrant settlers who mercilessly displaced indigenous people with their determination to acquire "free" land.  A Polish family quickly absorbs America's racial prejudices despite their parallels to their treatment by Germans in the Old World. Same old, same old no matter where you go.

Russell alternates the perspectives of her primary characters:  the Antidote herself, an unwed mother writing to the child taken away from her at birth; a bachelor farmer who, as a child, witnesses 

the horrific wholesale slaughter of jackrabbits with clubs but whose inherited land somehow remains verdant in the midst of an interminable drought; his niece, a plucky, adolescent lesbian basketball captain and wanna-be witch whose mother has been murdered; a Black photographer with a magical camera sent by the federal Resettlement Administration (an actual New Deal government program) to document the rural hinterlands; and a terse scarecrow whose transubstantiation, while farfetched, provides the same kind of closure that Dorothy and her companions eventually found .

But aside from a corrupt sheriff who hides his incompetence by conjuring a serial killer, The Antidote has little to propel it, and fantastic journeys, ending with overdue epiphanies, no matter how welcome, do not make for compelling reads.

I don’t want to live this way any longer, swinging in a sightless panic to defend the box into which I was born, repeating the story that it’s necessary.

Oedipus (5*)

 

What if a birth certificate--or lack of one--WAS the smoking gun for a political candidate on the cusp of winning an election?

That's the question posed by writer/director Robert Icke in his absolutely absorbing update of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, a spoiler-proof tragedy even for those who never have read the Greek original.  The production begins with a video interview of the charismatic title character, played with chilling assurance by Mark Strong, projected across the entire stage. He smoothly promises to share his birth certificate immediately following his election to demonstrate that he is a man of the people, a product of the rural countryside despite his opponent's insinuations otherwise, and to investigate the death of a former strongman which has left years of political chaos in its wake.  When the curtain lifts, Creon, his adviser (John Carroll Lynch as you've never seen him before, credibly playing a Brit), and his wife Jocasta (the incomparable Lesley Manville) are aghast.  But Oedipus insists it must be done; truth is his brand.

Although Oedipus the King likely was likely the first reading on the syllabus for the Humanities course that defines Columbia's core curriculum, I've never seen it on stage and I couldn't imagine it having the believability and emotional impact that Icke, a young Turk from the West End (which seems to breed them) has given it with an almost unbearable injection of pedophilia and superb performances all around.  Am I actually sobbing in Studio 54, a place I remember with nothing but fondness?  Do I feel as invisible as the old woman Oedipus believes to be his mother (Anne Reid, 90 and still going strong), but for whom he has no time on election night despite her desperation to protect him from the political scandal that will surely follow his election?  How is it possible that I recalled the prophet's name, Teiresias, more than 50 years since being introduced to him when I can't remember the names of the characters in the novel I'm currently reading?  Did one of Antigone's siblings really just call her a see-you-next-Tuesday?

Icke's contemporary spin even manages to give the play a gay angle nearly 2500 years after it was first performed, at a time when same-sex relationships didn't require a label.  When his youngest son, Oedipus's favorite, tattles on an older brother's infidelity during a family celebration, the implicated brother retaliates by asking why he didn't bring his boyfriend. Despite his eventual support, the king isn't necessarily cool with his son's homosexuality but he lauds him for admitting the truth while simultaneously making the strongest and most succinct case I've ever heard for coming out to your parents.

Things don't go so well for Oedipus by the time the two-hour clock, which escalates the tension every passing minute, flashes to zero.  As the insanely clever sweatshirt I nearly bought on my way out blares:  "truth is a motherfu**er."  And I won't even mention the use to which he puts one of his birth mother's stiletto heels after a final coupling that elicits more audible gasps than the cunnilingus that precedes it.  YUCK!