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.