Imagine there was a person who could act as a vault for other people’s memories. For both the good memories that you wanted to make sure you never lost, as well as the bad or painful ones that weigh you down, this person could take them from you and hold them within herself without ever actually hearing a word. Your secrets are safe, and once unburdened you can go on with your daily life. You can also retrieve the memories whenever you want. As long as you have your deposit slip with the corresponding number, that memory is only a visit away. This person operates like a bank, but for the thoughts you want to keep safe instead of your cash.
Now place a woman with this ability in Nebraska in the 1930s. It is the Dustbowl, during the Depression, and many second-generation farmers are struggling. They’ve ripped up the land and farmed the way they thought was right, doing what their parents taught them, but nothing is working and the dust storms are only getting worse. There’s the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935 and the flooding of the Republican River, real natural disasters that wreaked havoc on the people who lived there.
This memory bank, or “prairie witch” as Karen Russell describes her, calls herself The Antidote. In Russell’s world, the recently settled western US has prairie witches scattered all throughout the new towns. She never explains why, but they seem to be present where the settlers have decided to stay or keep forging west. Even the witches themselves don’t know why they have this ability. But in Russell’s 1930s America, these women & their skills are a completely normal occurrence.
This is how Karen Russell’s stories always work: take one completely invented thing, drop it into an otherwise normal reality and see what plays out. Better known for her short stories, Russell has a knack for creating vivid scenes that stick with the reader for years - I can attest that I still see visions inspired by stories of hers read more than a decade ago. In this novel, Russell has the space and time to not just conjure images, but to explore so many themes surrounding memory and the cascading effects of what can happen when we choose to forget the moments and happenings that might be difficult or hard to bear, but are pivotal to who we are.
Told from five points of view, this historical fiction novel is full of characters and rich with ideas. We follow a struggling Nebraska farmer, his newly orphaned niece, a photographer working for the government as part of the New Deal, our very own prairie witch and a very thoughtful Scarecrow. Each of them plays an important role in letting us see the complexities of the settlement town of Uz. Borrowing from the book’s jacket, this novel is “fantastical, historical, supernatural, and miraculously faithful to the legacy of a nation’s ineradicable past.” Russell uses real, documented historical events combined with elements of her own design to fix our history as a lens so we can see more clearly what is happening now. She imagines individuals willing to stand up and fight for change, and how hard the need for change can be for struggling people to see.
There is so much to discuss in this novel, and I cannot wait to talk about it with anyone who reads it. Come find me after you’ve finished it for yourself!
Kari Meutsch and Kristian Preylowski co-own and run the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock.