SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Karen Russell's sprawling new novel begins on a day called Black Sunday, set during the Dust Bowl storms in the 1930s. The story is told by Antonina Rossi.
KAREN RUSSELL: (Reading) On Black Sunday, before anybody knew to call it Black Sunday, I woke up in the jailhouse to a sound like a freight train tunneling through me, an ear-splitting howl that seemed to shake the stone walls. My body trembled like a husk on the cot. My fingers clawed into the mattress. For those early moments in the dark, I was nothing but the fear of floating off. What had happened to me while I slept? It felt as if a knife had scraped the marrow from my bones. Something vital inside me had liquefied and drained away, and in its place was this new weightlessness.
SIMON: Karen Russell's new novel is called "The Antidote," and the celebrated novelist and MacArthur fellow joins us now from Portland, Oregon. Thank you so much for being with us.
RUSSELL: Thanks for having me, Scott.
SIMON: What's happening on this Sunday?
RUSSELL: This Sunday begins ordinarily - you know, blue skies. Around 3 p.m., it looks like it's, you know, midnight. There are these apocalyptic clouds of dust that really swallow the sun and sweep, you know, hundreds of tons of exposed fertile topsoil across the southern plains. They reach as far as D.C. You know, they famously dump on Congress. This was, you know, a stretch of time where these droughts and, you know, poor agricultural practices resulted in the dirt raining down, you know, from the heavens.
SIMON: Tell us about Antonina. Because she has a gift - if that's quite the way to phrase it - doesn't she?
RUSSELL: She does. Antonina was sort of the beginning of this novel for me. I got an image when I was finishing my first novel, quite a long time ago now, of a woman holding an ear horn - they look sort of like gramophone horns, these antique hearing aids - while a man was whispering a secret to her and sort of leaving his consciousness and entering her body. So she has a gift for sort of swallowing the past and holding it in storage for people. Her baby was taken from her at a home for unwed mothers. And this loss in - you know, in this novel - it sort of dynamites a space inside her that she is renting out as storage for the memories that people can't stand to remember or bear to forget.
SIMON: It's - she puts them in a vault of her subconscious, doesn't she?
RUSSELL: Yes, exactly. Yeah. They're sort of beyond the waterline of her waking consciousness. She herself doesn't even know, you know, what these people are whispering to her. And they can come and make withdrawals, too. You know, they read their deposit slip backwards, and it leaves her and reenters them. But she says, you know, just like a vault, she doesn't know what she contains. On the Black Sunday referenced, she sort of wakes up in that jailhouse to that terrible weightlessness. Everything she's stored for this town for 15 years has been whisked out of her body.
SIMON: There's a photographer who's dispatched to capture the crisis. Her camera has what I'll call a special sight.
RUSSELL: There's a photographer. She's not - you know, she's fictional. Her name is Cleo Allfrey, and she's sent really to document rural poverty. And with this camera that has special sight, she starts to take pictures that feel inexplicable of things that seem to be happening on a piece of ground, you know, maybe yesterday, maybe 500 years in the past, maybe in some hypothetical future.
SIMON: Her photographs disclose the fact that people were there before people we called immigrants ever got there.
RUSSELL: Yes. So some of the photographs are showing that long before Europeans come to this region, there are other communities - the dozens of Native nations that have been successfully living on and with this prairie ecosystem for millennia. And so some of what she's seeing is sort of a past world of flourishing. And then she's also sort of able to conjure both hell worlds but also, you know, blue skies, places where buffalo are kind of migrating out of the past and into the future. And that felt important to me. One of the inspirations for Cleo's character - you know, I learned a lot from Gordon Parks and his books.
SIMON: Gordon Parks, the great photographer. Yes.
RUSSELL: You know, he said two things that really struck me. And one was, I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera. And I found myself with this particular camera with its unique long range. You know, we have these things installed in us in birth, and they're our imaginations. And we can do this incredible thing - conjuring these future worlds that - maybe that don't exist today, but they could, and making those real. And right now, I think it's really easy for a lot of us to extrapolate from what's happening today to a really bleak vision of tomorrow. And so I think part of what I tried to do in this book is use my imagination to draw other kinds of worlds into focus.
SIMON: Well, you have a discussion between a couple of locals at one point. And somebody says, it's a shame, but it's over and done with.
RUSSELL: Right. And, I mean, if there's anything that this novel taught me, it's that the past is certainly not safely in the past - right? - and that it really cohabits with the present and continues to shape it. And I really wanted, as I mentioned, to try to envision a future that was not apocalyptic, right? A future world that felt more just and more peaceful, you know, with shared abundance for all. And to do that - I think we can't do that unless we return to our nation's history and try to reckon with it.
SIMON: In life, isn't a certain amount of strategic forgetting the antidote, if you please, to just going on?
RUSSELL: Yes. I mean, I - it's humbling to write a book about the gaps in people's memories while I'm very aware of many in my own, Scott, you know? I don't think we can hold the entire secret cargo we each carry. It can't always be present to us, right? And certainly, this book isn't a full 360, right? It's not so much about, like, filling in all the holes as sort of illuminating what possibilities and responsibilities we might be missing.
SIMON: Karen Russell - her new novel, "The Antidote" - thank you so much for being with us.
RUSSELL: Thank you, Scott. It was a pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
