Karen Russell on her novel, ‘The Antidote,’ and disaster’s road to hope

Karen Russell was the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 2013. The MacArthur Foundation was impressed by her “uncanny ability to blend fantastical elements with psychological realism and themes of transformation and redemption.”

Consider me impressed, as well. Full disclosure — Russell is one of my favorite writers. I was lucky enough to talk to her about her collection of short stories, “Orange World and Other Stories,” here on WPR’s “BETA” a while back.

Russell’s long-awaited new novel, “The Antidote,” is well worth the wait.

Here’s the opening paragraph of the novel: “The Prairie Witch. A person can lose everything in an instant. A fortune, a family, the son. I’ve had to learn this lesson twice in my life. The first time it happened, I was a 15 -year -old fugitive from the home for unwed mothers. The second time, I was a prairie witch chained to my cot in a cinder-block jailhouse. ‘Your second home,’ the sheriff liked to say. Officially, I do not exist in his West. Nevertheless, it is a crime to pay me a visit.”

The folllowing interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Doug Gordon: “The Antidote” is your latest novel, and you say that it is connected to your debut novel, “Swamplandia.” How so?

Karen Russell: Well, my joke forever was that I was writing “Drylandia,” a rebound book, because I spent a lot of my 20s writing about South Florida. It did seem like quite a jump to go to the Great Depression, this very arid region, which I didn’t have the same kind of familial connections to. But I think I had to write this book to discover how deep some of the connections are.

One landscape is the Florida Everglades and the other is like this drought- stricken prairie ecology, but the forces behind what looks like just extreme weather and terror, they’re really the same, right? It’s part of a longer story of a capitalist colonial expansion in this country.

DG: Very well said. “The Antidote” is set in the fictional town of Oz, Nebraska, during the Dust Bowl, and it is bookended by two real weather events. What are these events and why did you decide to include them?

KR: So the Black Sunday Storm, which I bet a lot of people know, is documented right in the Ken Burns documentary and “The Grapes of Wrath.” And it’s this just apocalyptic storm that sweeps across the plain states and carries this sod all the way to Congress, famously dumps it on the streets of Congress.

And then there was the Republican River flooding, which happens just a few months later in this same region and this very gentle kind of wide river receives 24 inches of rain in a 24-hour period. So in some ways it felt like an answer to prayer at first, right? Finally rain has come. And then also because of these drought conditions, the flooding has devastated consequences.

DG: What do you want your readers to take away from “The Antidote”?

KR: I wish that I could transfer some of the hope I genuinely came to feel to readers. And part of that is what happens to the characters inside the book. These people who feel quite isolated, who don’t entirely understand what they’re meant to be doing in their lives or whose lives seem to be deviating from the trajectory that they imagined — they find each other and they start working together and they start tuning their own gifts and imaginations in the service of justice and in the service of healing. And I really felt like outside the book, I was meeting people who were doing precisely that.

So I came to feel, even now at a time where I know a lot of people are feeling warranted concern about the future — this sounds so obvious, but I was like, if we can try to make our vision of the world we want to inhabit more vivid and more plausible than these hell worlds that just come too easily at 4 a .m., that’s a real start.

If we can help each other to really believe that a different kind of future is possible without skipping the step of reckoning with this past and trying to put things right — I think that probably sounds so obvious outside the book, but that was another one for me. I’m like, oh my God, I cannot imagine a vibrant future alone.

DG: You did get a lot of hope into the book, though, so you can be pleased about that. Maybe you don’t think so, but I think you did.

KR: Oh, I’m glad. It’s a tricky balance, isn’t it? Because you don’t want to be sentimental and you don’t want to deny reality either. I think just getting to feel that shift out of resignation, like, “Oh, well, what choice do I have?” and shifting it to something like, “What choices do we have?” That did feel powerful to me. And that feels like a good question to be asking right now.