THE ANTIDOTE

In the wake of the destructive Black Sunday dust storm in 1935, four outcasts dare to offer their dying town a radical vision of the future.

Antonina Rossi, an Italian immigrant and survivor of the Milford Home for Unwed Mothers, is the prairie witch of Uz, Nebraska. By falling into a trance, she relieves customers of memories they no longer want and deposits them in the vault of her subconscious. When the dust storm sweeps those memories clean away, Rossi recognizes her “bankruptcy” for what it really is: a mortal danger. Like most witches, Rossi is an outsider, and she throws her lot in with a band of fellow misfits. There’s Asphodel Oletsky, a teen basketball star and born hustler in love with her best friend; Harp Oletsky, Dell’s shy bachelor uncle, whose farm miraculously survives the roiling clouds of dust; and Cleo Allfrey, a Black government photographer sent to document the crisis with a camera that somehow captures the past—and the possibilities of the future. Russell has always expertly woven the strange into depictions of the everyday, and her long-awaited second novel is no exception. Though the language here is looser and more conversational than in her past work, she still has a knack for capturing images in a deft turn of phrase—the flowers of a potted begonia have “small, blushing faces,” for instance. But what’s really on display here is Russell’s reckoning with America’s past and her hopeful appeals for its future. She juxtaposes the immigration story of the Oletskys against the forced removal of Native Americans from the West and lets the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl resonate with the contemporary horrors of climate change. Characters struggle with their complicity in the American project of Native erasure and violence against vulnerable people, reinforced by the collective forgetting that prairie witches enable. While the full picture of the novel takes time to develop, the final portrait is as unforgettable as the images Cleo Allfrey hangs on her darkroom line: A singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on.

A storytelling tour de force that lives up to the promise of its name.