Louise Erdrich’s latest novel ‘The Mighty Red’ showcases her equally impressive talents
She hadn't meant to fall in love with anybody, and was she even in love at all? To be sure, something had clicked. Hugo made her laugh about herself. Laughing made her delirious. In Gary's case, there was nothing like being rejected and then embraced. She'd been invisible, at best sneered at by most of the cool guys. Then suddenly adored by Gary, who'd been way too anxious to marry her. — from "The Mighty Red"
Louise Erdrich's "The Mighty Red" was touted early on as one of the big books of the season and this Minneapolis Pulitzer Prize winner exceeds expectations. No wonder BookPage speculated that her 19th novel "might just be a new American classic."
In her first novel since "The Sentence" (2021), Erdrich displays all her writing talents in a multifaceted story set during hardships caused by the 2008 recession in a small town in North Dakota's Red River Valley, named for the north-flowing Red River. She holds together human loves and foibles, hard-working people, destruction of the land, growing and processing sugar beets, life in a rural community, all surrounding a story about teen and mother-daughter love. Told in short chapters, some only a few paragraphs on the page, it's tender-hearted, often funny and sometimes dark.
It begins with Native American Crystal hauling sugar beets from field to warehouse on the night shift. Her smart, bored, restless daughter, Kismet, is suddenly noticed by football hero Gary Geist, son of the richest farmer in the area. Kismet is kind of drawn to Gary because he makes her feel important and she thinks he needs her, but she's also in love with Hugo, a big, smart, home-schooled guy who works at his mother's bookstore. (Erdrich owns independent Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.)
Hovering over much of the story is a secret about an earlier accident involving Gary, which he won't discuss. Against her better judgment, Kismet marries Gary and we meet his mother, who relies on Kismet to cook and clean. The marriage doesn't go well and Kismet wants to go home to Crystal. Her mother worries about Kismet living at the Geist farm but she has her own problems after her theater-loving husband disappears with money from the church's renovation fund and many in the town turn against her.
There are plenty of other characters, including Gary's friends who were with him when the secret "something" happened, and women attending a hilarious book club meeting where they drink wine and snipe at one another while the harried hostess tries to keep the conversation on track.
Running through the narrative is the land, almost a character itself. Hugo goes off the oil patch for work that brings fracking into the story. The older farmers see what is happening to the soil when chemicals are sprayed on the fields, but younger ones like Gary see the future as organic.
Here Erdrich pulls these threads together:
"In some places, lambsquarters is considered the Prince of Greens, one of the most nutritious greens ever analyzed; it was one of the earliest agricultural crops of the Americas. It also resembles amaranth, but the brothers rarely spoke of that. The rough cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing the sugar beet, perhaps the least nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious."
Describing the plot of "The Mighty Red" can't capture Erdrich's poetic writing about hopes, dreams, hallucinations, fears and tragedy.. Best of all, she brings readers into 2023 to let us know what happened to the characters that have our sympathy.
"The Mighty Red" (Harper, $32) earned starred reviews from Kirkus ("deft, almost winsome"), Library Journal and Publishers Weekly "(tender and capacious").
Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa (Ojibwe) and the author of novels, poetry, children's books and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel "The Night Watchman" won the Pulitzer Prize and "The Round House" won the National Book Award. "Love Medicine" and "LaRose" received the National Book Critics Circle award.
She will discuss her novel at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Fitzgerald Theater, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul, in the Talking Volumes reading series. $30, $25, $22.50. Go to mprevents.org .
