Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This belief may be the central theme of Karen Russell’s The Antidote. Another related theme is purposefully forgetting or depositing one’s memories in a vault so that life can proceed without dealing with or learning from historical events.
The Antidote is set in a fictional Nebraska town called Uz while FDR was president in 1935. The main story takes place roughly between two disasters that struck the people of this region: Black Sunday, one of the most catastrophic dusters during the Dust Bowl, and the Republican River Flood. Uz is an allusion to Oz, the magical land that does not quite deliver its promises. In The Antidote, a group of Polish immigrants received large tracts of land to farm and seek the American dream. Although they had been forced from their homeland because of oppression, few honored the Native Americans they had oppressed to obtain their land.
Karen Russell’s novel includes multiple characters’ viewpoints, one of which is Antonina Rossi, who, before Black Sunday, had been the vault to the townspeople, allowing them to deposit their memories and withdraw them if they wanted. She was known in Uz as the Prairie Witch and the Antidote. She lost her superpowers on Black Sunday and was soon to be exposed for the fraud she was. The Antidote’s addresses her narration to her son, who was taken from her at birth at a cruel, abusive home for unwed mothers. She is the quintessential, disparaged outsider “woman” who is a mother. Although the reader knows about her motherhood from the book’s early chapters, she does not reveal it to the other storytellers until later in the novel. There are multiple nuanced messages for modern readers in the descriptors and actions of the Antidote.
Another storyteller whose viewpoint is essential to the overall story is Asphodel (Dell) Oletsky, named after a flower, and living with her Uncle Harp Oletsky in Uz after her mother was brutally murdered. Dell is a rising basketball star on a local team that becomes known as The Dangers after Black Sunday. Dell and her uncle, another storyteller, have differences in lifestyle and personality, but both have a love for the murdered mother, Harp’s sister. Both also struggle with good and evil. When the Oletsky wheat farm is the only one spared after the infamous Black Sunday dusting, we realize how magical realism and supernatural intervention play a role in the development of the plot.
The government sent New Deal Black photographer Cleo Allfrey to document the Dust Bowl in Nebraska. Cleo’s descriptions of the people and land differ from those of the primarily white townspeople, and her narration contributes to the themes of what is real and what is counterfeit. Cleo’s Graflex camera has the magical ability to show past and present. With her unusual camera and her outsider status, she is instrumental in exposing the inaccuracies believed and perpetuated by local town leaders since the Polish settlers took the land from the Natives. Of course, her presence in this novel highlights the injustices of the United States government that continue today. Uz is but a microcosm of the country where the people ignore the value of the Natives, persecute non-Europeans, and continually repeat the mistakes of the past.
Other narrators include a scarecrow and a cat. They further the analogy to the fable of the Wizard of Oz and figure prominently as the story progresses. While The Wizard of Oz provided commentary on political, economic, and social events of America in the late 1800s, The Antidote is a modern parable that uses the atrocities of Manifest Destiny and the Dust Bowl as its basis but is clearly speaking about modern times. It is a cautionary tale about how Americans cannot choose to erase the ugly memories. Government officials, throughout the history of the United States have used rhetoric and euphemism to deny and rationalize the treatment of the disenfranchised. In 2025, when this novel is published, our country continues to face far-reaching consequences of questionable actions over the past years.
