Revisiting: Karen Russell on her novel 'The Antidote'
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Who is Karen Russell and what are her notable achievements?
I'm Beth Golay, and this is Marginalia. Karen Russell is a novelist and short story writer with many bona fides. In 2009, the National Book Foundation named Russell a Five Under 35 honoree. In 2011, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her debut novel, Swamplandia, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 2013. And her latest novel, The Antidote, was a finalist for the National Book Award. It is an American epic set in the 1930s, immediately following the Black Sunday dust storm. Set in the land of Uz, Nebraska, it has a little bit of everything. Basketball, prairie witches who collect memories, a magical camera, a scarecrow, and so much more.
In anticipation of the paperback release next week, we thought we'd revisit the conversation we had with Karen Russell when The Antidote first came out. You wrote in your acknowledgments that this book in some form or another has been with you for nearly a third of your life. Can you give a brief description of the antidote and share when and where it began for you? Yeah, absolutely. My friend who's better at math pointed that out to me and I was stunned actually to think about how long how much of my lifetime I've really been thinking about this place and these people. I was finishing my first novel, which is called Swamplandia, and it's set in the Florida Everglades. And my joke back then was I was writing Drylandia, you know, like set in like this, a very arid time and place.
And I think actually it just took writing this book to realize that they're really connected at the root. I got this image when I was finishing that novel about a woman who was holding this antique hearing aid, an ear horn, you know if you've seen they look kind of like gramophone horns and someone was whispering something into it and i just i don't know i was like oh i it's going to be a book about these living memory banks and also a collapse of memory i just had this idea of these women who kind of you know they're often marginalized or you know some some they've suffered some tremendous loss that's like sort of torn a hole through them and then they rent that out as storage space essentially so people will come and whisper pieces of the past that they just find unbearable or maybe too precious right something
that you want to put up the way you'd put a keepsake in a vault. And they call themselves the vaults. And so this lady haunted me for a long time. And I knew it would be set during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought. I had been writing in this first novel about the Dredgenfield campaign of the Everglades, which was kind of a campaign of colonial capitalist expansion through my home of South Florida. So I was interested in that time period. My own grandfather and grandmother worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps. in the Works Progress Administration. I was sort of haunted in the earlier novel by these cycles of dispossession. That book was about a family whose alligator wrestling park was about to be foreclosed on, but it was also about
oh, like the fantasy for sale in my home state and kind of the real histories and possibilities it covers up. And I think this novel in a real way is sort of circling some of those same questions about, well, what have many of us forgotten kind of privately and collectively? And like, what kind of possibilities would we be able to see if we told fuller stories about our country's origins, about our own families? So that's a long, long answer, Ben.
What is the premise of Karen Russell's novel 'The Antidote'?
I always have too much coffee to prepare for these things. I really loved the way you tied together thematically, I guess, like three of your plot points, because you just mentioned these women had a hole torn in them through loss, but then there was also the deposit of memories into the Prairie Witches' Vault and the documentary photography project for the Resettlement Association. The latter was run by Roy Stryker, who would punch a hole into photo negatives to reject them,
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Who is Karen Russell and what are her notable achievements?
0:00–3:32
2
What is the premise of Karen Russell's novel 'The Antidote'?
3:32–6:18
3
How did the idea for 'The Antidote' evolve over time?
6:18–20:42
4
What themes are explored through the characters in 'The Antidote'?
20:42–24:01
5
How does historical context influence the narrative of 'The Antidote'?
24:01–29:23