If you look back at my entries for 2024, you’ll see that I discussed few books during the entire year. The reason was not that I had quit reading, but that I was working under a non-disclosure agreement for Mystery Writers of America, an agreement that finally lapsed on May 1, 2025. At last I may now reveal to the world that I was working as a judge for the Best Novel category in the annual Edgar Allan Poe Awards, the top prize for mystery writers. I read lots and lots of mystery novels, many part-way (far enough to know that the book would not be a contender), and many all the way through. I hope to find more chances to discuss the details of the job in future entries. For now, I just want to explain why I was writing throughout 2024 so much about plays, movies, and people and so rarely about books.
This month I’m eager to discuss two new books that illustrate just how expansive the general topic of history can be. First, Karen Russell’s The Antidote is a novel set in the United States in 1935. Second, Dan Jones’s Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King is a biography of the man to whom Shakespeare gave his famous “band of brothers” speech. Russell’s novel includes elements of the fantastic; Jones’s biography scrupulously observes all the conventions of good scholarship, including extensive notes and a long bibliography. Both works aim to deliver the truth about their subjects, and they both succeed, even though the kinds of truth they provide are utterly different.
Let’s begin with the novel. In an author’s note co-written with the Native American historian James Riding In at the end of The Antidote, Karen Russell admits that she “uses fantastical conceits” to illuminate psychological truths. In other words, to use Marianne Moore’s famous description of poetry, The Antidote presents imaginary gardens with real toads in them. The book begins with the notorious Black Sunday dust storm of April 14, 1935, which turned the sky black with dust and ruined farmland, and it ends with the Republican River flood of May 30, also in 1935, just six weeks after the cataclysmic dust storm. Between these two nearly inconceivable and historically documented natural disasters, Russell sandwiches her imaginary gardens, focusing on Antonina Rossi, better known among the other characters as The Antidote, a so-called prairie witch or “vault” who has the ability to store memories for people who don’t want to remember unpleasant events from their past. Within this imaginary garden we get a very real toad: an indictment of the pernicious American habit of simply forgetting about any sordid or shameful part of our history. Russell was working on her novel long before Donald Trump and his team scolded the Smithsonian and other museums for their supposed failure to emphasize the positive, cheerful elements of American history, but whether she was psychic, prescient, or merely lucky with her timing, Russell and her novel challenge everyone who wishes to obliterate or conceal sordid moments in our national past. What elevates a potential screed into art is her cast of dynamic characters, including a good-hearted farmer, his lively niece, and an African-American photographer who possesses a “quantum” camera that produces photographs of events from the past and the future. The Antidote joins the ranks of such works as Daniel Mason’s North Woods, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, and Frances Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz as recent examples of speculative fiction—that which employs the fantastical just enough to explore “what if” in an otherwise familiar world.
Now let’s turn to the biography. If ageism is a bias based on age, and sexism is bias based on sex, may I coin the term nominalism to describe bias based on a person’s name? I’ve seen an exercise used for new teachers wherein the educator-in-training gets a list of first names—nothing more—and assigns a grade to each student based on the name. Repeatedly “Elizabeth” receives higher grades than “Bubba,” even though the grade-assigner would have never met either student and would be looking at no data about their performance in class. That’s nominalism. And I was guilty of it when I heard that a man named Dan Jones had written a biography of Henry V. Dan Jones? That is not the name of a serious scholar. Serious scholars have names like Leon Edel and Robert Caro. Dan Jones sounds like the quarterback of your high school football team. But in truth Dan Jones combines painstaking scholarship with eloquent writing to give us a life of Henry V that never fails to engross us and forever succeeds in clarifying the truth about this man from the myth perpetuated by the likes of Raphael Holinshed and William Shakespeare.
Consider that Shakespeare introduces Prince Hal as a fun-loving party boy who initially prefers the holiday world of the tavern to the sober responsibility of the palace. Not until his father rebukes him does Shakespeare’s Hal step into his role as the heir to the throne. His great test comes at the Battle of Shrewsbury, where he defeats his rival Hotspur to assure his eventual ascension to the throne. This plot makes for great drama and a stirring climax to one of the best plays ever written. In truth, however, as Dan Jones so carefully demonstrates, Hal was only sixteen years old when he fought at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Hotspur was in his mid-30’s. They never met in combat, and Hal was seriously injured when he took an arrow in his face. Somewhat melodramatically, Jones begins his biography with the surgical operation required to save the life of the young prince. After that arresting opening with its foregone conclusion—spoiler alert: the prince survives—the Henry who emerges from Jones’s biography makes much more sense than the one Shakespeare portrays. I’ll concede that Shakespeare’s character is much more fun for audiences watching him on the stage. But Jones lays out methodically and clearly the historical context for Henry’s long and finally exhausting military campaigns in France and his complex relationship with his father. Henry V was a reader, a musician, and a military tactician superior to any of his contemporaries because of his long apprenticeship on the field of battle, an apprenticeship that began in his early teens.
These two books remind me of how escapism need not be scanty in intellectual content. Karen Russell transports us to an era 90 years ago that is at once strange and cringingly familiar. Dan Jones escorts us several centuries earlier to a fractious Medieval England by using the man who became Henry V as his portal. I’m happy to read—and sometimes write—mystery novels as a way of distracting myself from the current political scene, but I’m even happier to read more substantial works for the sake of simultaneous distraction and illumination. Karen Russell and Dan Jones, thanks for the experiences.