An ambitious novel that tries to shed light on worthy causes, but IMHO, it tries to do too much for one book.
This book by Karen Russell tries to draw a connection between money disappearing when a bank goes bankrupt and memories disappearing when a “Prairie Witch” goes “bankrupt,” but I’m not sure the execution worked for me.
The book focuses on different characters in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska in the 1930s. One is a “Prairie Witch,” which means she can hold people’s memories. People speak the memories they want her take through an ear horn she uses, she goes into a trance, and takes in the memory, but she can’t consciously remember what they told her. When they want the memory back, they speak their deposit number into the ear horn, and the prairie witch goes into a trance and tells them their memory, word for word.
Prairie Witches live on the edges of society because no one really trusts them, and some tend to claim they’re doing the work of the devil. But people still pay them to hold their memories. Sometimes they’re painful memories they can’t bear to hold onto, and sometimes they’re happy memories they want the Prairie Witch to hold for safekeeping.
The book starts with a dust storm that, not only wreaks havoc on the town, but “bankrupts” the local Prairie Witch. Although she’s never been able to consciously remember her “deposits,” she feels a hollowness inside her that lets her know she’s “bankrupt.”
Not only that, but she’s incapable of taking in new memories. She still goes into her trance and can’t remember what was said into the ear horn, but when someone tries to make a withdrawal, she has nothing to give them.
Now she’s trying to figure out how to keep her customers from knowing she’s bankrupt before they run her out of town, best case scenario.
That’s not easy because, as people are getting ready to leave Uz for greener pastures, they’re coming to withdraw their deposits, making for a kind of “run on the bank.”
It’s not a very subtle metaphor.
Every chapter from the Prairie Witch’s perspective is told as a letter to her son. She got pregnant as a teenager and was put in a home “for unwed mothers,” where they were abused, but the mothers formed friendships with each other.
The Prairie Witch was told her son was stillborn, but she knows otherwise, and has spent her life since then trying to track him down and leaving hints as to her whereabouts in case he ever comes looking for her.
I definitely think the book could have dropped that entire plotline without losing anything.
The second main character is Asphodel “Dell” Oletsky, the granddaughter of Polish immigrants. Her mother was recently murdered, and she never knew her father, so she’s moved in with her uncle Harp, who’s still running the farm his parents left him.
For some reason, he’s having a lucky streak he can’t explain. His crops are thriving while his neighbors’ crops are failing. He gets elected Grain Keeper. One of the women in town starts flirting with him.
My personal theory is all this has something to do with the scarecrow in his field who is slowly recovering his memories from when he was human, but I don’t think that’s ever state in the book.
Anyway, Dell was the only character I really cared about in this book. She’s grieving the death of her mother, which isn’t easy because her mother was an addict, so even when she was alive, Dell was always walking on tiptoe, hoping for the best, but expecting the worst.
In Uz, Dell becomes captain of the high school girls’ basketball team. She and her friend/teammate/girlfriend are determine to play basketball professionally. People keep telling them there’s no such thing as a woman who plays basketball professionally, but they know better. They have their heroes they keep reminding themselves and each other about so they can keep their eyes on the prize.
When the team’s sponsor stops sponsoring the team due to lack of funds, Dell looks around for ways to make money. When she hears how much Prairie Witches make, she becomes determined to become a Prairie Witch.
The Prairie Witch tests her for any magical abilities, but the test comes back negative. You’re either a Prairie Witch, or you aren’t, and Dell isn’t.
But Dell refuses to take no for an answer. When she discovers the Prairie Witch is bankrupt, she comes up with a way to help the Prairie Witch save face, and make some money for both of them.
When people make deposits to the Prairie Witch, Dell hides in the closet and transcribes their memories so the Prairie Witch knows what to tell them when they come to make their withdrawal.
When people who made their deposit before the Dust Storm come to make a withdrawal, Dell just makes stuff up and tells the Prairie Witch what to say. It turns out Dell is really good at figuring out what people want to hear.
Cleo Allfrey is a Black woman working as a New Deal photographer. Her job is to go around the country and take pictures of “ordinary Americans” for a publication in Washington, D.C., but no matter how hard she tries, she seems to be unable to take the pictures her editor wants. When things get really weird in Uz, she quits her job, knowing her editor will never believe the photos she’s taken.
That’s because the photos she’s taken show things from centuries in the past and centuries in the future.
She even manages to take photographs of a crime she didn’t witness.
Remember that Dell’s mother was murdered?
It turns out she was murdered by a serial killer known as the “Rabbit’s Foot Killer” because he would always leave a rabbit’s foot with the body.
A man was found in connection with the murders and made to confess, but not only is he not the killer, it might not be a serial killer at all. The sheriff made up the part about the rabbit’s feet so he could find a scapegoat, pin the murders on him, and get a win just in time for election day.
So, when another woman turns up murdered with the alleged murderer still in prison, the sheriff can’t let that news get around, so he buries her outside of town. Then he has his deputy (and accomplice to the crime) make a deposit with the Prairie Witch so he can’t snitch.
So, Cleo helps Dell and the Prairie Witch bring that scandal to light, but there’s still the matter of the atrocities that had to happen for Uz to be founded in the first place.
When going through a box of old things in the house, Dell discovers a deposit slip from a Prairie Witch. They manage to track down the Prairie Witch, who, fortunately, was out of range of the Dust Storm, and so has not been bankrupt. When Harp speaks the deposit number into the ear horn, he gets a very long memory his father deposited of how he and his wife migrated from Poland to Nebraska to start a new life. They ran from persecution in Poland, but when they got to America, they found a different kind of persecution. This time they’re on the other side, and while they don’t think it’s right, they find out how easy it is to “go along to get along,” no matter what it costs others.
While he works his farm, his wife works as a teacher in a boarding school for Native Americans. She struggles to keep going to work because of all the awful things inflicted on Native Americans there, but he tells her they need the money and urges her to keep working until the baby comes.
But she has miscarriage after miscarriage until she begs him to let her go to a Prairie Witch to unburden herself of all the awful things she has seen and done at the school. Only after she has done so does she manage to give birth to a healthy baby boy named Harp.
He goes on to tell the story of how he started spreading rumors about Native Americans. He thought the rumors were harmless until people start hunting down and killing Native Americans over the rumors they’ve heard. He feels awful, but he also can’t deny that he’s benefitting from the persecution of Native Americans.
So, this book is about the desperation of the Dust Bowl, bank runs, dirty cops who only care about the next election, and the Original Sin of this country. As I take a step back and consider all that, it becomes clear why I didn’t like this book. I like what it’s trying to do, but I think it tried to do too much in one book. Any one of those issues could have made up a whole novel, but by trying to jam it all into one book, it felt overstuffed.
I enjoyed the parts of the book that focused on Dell, but I had a hard time caring about any of the other characters. I did like Cleo after a while, but it took some time because, initially, she was inserted into the narrative in the form of letters to and from her editor, and it wasn’t immediately clear what it had to do with Uz. It wasn’t until she arrived in Uz and started narrating full chapters and interacting with the other characters that we got to know her better and I decided I liked her.