Two historic disasters in Nebraska anchor the narrative in The Antidote, the new novel from Portland author Karen Russell.

On April 14, 1935, amid a drought, a storm blew dust and sand for hundreds of miles across the Great Plains, turning the day so dark that it became known as Black Sunday. An Associated Press reporter who saw the effects of the storm, and others that had preceded it, coined the term “Dust Bowl.” Forty-six days later, on May 30, 1935, the Republican River flooded, killing more than 100 people and thousands of farm animals and destroying buildings and farmland.

Between these events, Russell has set a story about what we choose to remember, what we choose to forget, and why. She examines how communities come together and fall apart and how community memory plays a role. She draws a bright line from forgetting on a communal scale to loss on an environmental scale. She describes The Antidote, her second novel and sixth book, with a phrase she credits to fellow author Morgan Talty: “Memory is both the poison and the cure here.” 

The Antidote goes on sale Tuesday, March 11. Russell will discuss the book that evening with fellow Portland author Emily Chenoweth at Powell’s City of Books. 

The idea of a Dust Bowl novel rolled around in Russell’s brain for nearly a decade, starting while she was finishing her 2011 debut novel, Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. “I was like, I can’t wait to write this next one,” she said. 

But Russell found herself repeatedly picking up and setting down the book. Then came 2020, with its own pair of overlapping disasters, the coronavirus pandemic and a historic Oregon wildfire season. “Somehow, through that experience, suddenly I felt like I had a new way into and through this book,” she said. 

The Antidote is set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, home to a woman Russell calls a prairie witch. “She is a woman who absorbs people’s memories. That’s her job. She’s the living bank for this town,” Russell said. The woman advertises herself as The Antidote, “selling oblivion as a cure-all,” as Russell puts it. Got a memory that’s painful or shameful or depressing? Deposit it today and enjoy instant relief! 

Sponsor

On Black Sunday, the prairie witch abruptly goes bankrupt. “All of those memories, everything except her own meager biography gets whisked out of her,” Russell said. The witch decides to act as if nothing has changed and hires a local teenager to help her fabricate memories for customers who come in for withdrawals. After all, they don’t even know what they’ve forgotten.

Between this collapse of memory and the collapse of the local environment, the people of Uz realize they’re living in an existential disaster. Some turn on their neighbors. Others, seeing a direct correlation between the two collapses, edge toward an unlikely alliance. Russell writes from their varying perspectives as they piece together a memory quilt of Uz. 

There’s the prairie witch, tied to Uz by a personal trauma she refuses to forget. There’s the town’s mysteriously successful wheat farmer whose Polish immigrant father chose to forget his past. There’s the wheat farmer’s teenage niece, who longs to get out of Uz and forget it. There’s the government photographer who arrives in Uz to document the Dust Bowl for future memory. Together, they work to jog their community into acknowledging and learning from its complicated past, with a little unexpected help from a scarecrow who has begun to remember and a cat who remembers all too well. 

“There’s just no single answer to the collective problems we face, but you can choose to try to be an answer,” Russell said. 

For these characters, and for the community of Uz, memory moves hand in hand with belief and imagination. When memory vanishes or changes or returns, people believe and imagine differently. Russell hopes readers pick up on the message that “it really matters to believe a better state is possible.” 

“We have these imaginations that can conjure hell worlds,” Russell said, “but they can also conjure worlds that have not existed but might. And that feels like a tremendously powerful muscle to be working in 2025.”