The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

After crossing the Red River sometime in the 1830s, a priest climbed a tree seeking a spot where he could safely observe an approaching herd of buffalo. There he witnessed a deranging spectacle--the buffalo stretched all the way to where they disappeared into the line between sky and earth. He was forced to stay in the tree for three days as they passed, passed and migrated, three days of horizon-to-horizon buffalo. He nearly died of thirst. 'You may judge now the richness of these prairies,' he wrote later. There was no end to the beasts. Just like it seems there is no end to us, in our billions. But everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.

Kismet Poe is torn between two men: one is Gary Geist, a local football star whose chief attraction seems to be that he is desperately in love with her. His desperation, we learn, has something to do with a horrible accident that killed two of Gary's friends, and which Kismet's proximity seems to allay. The other is Hugo, an oafish redhead who works at the local bookstore. Hugo is sensitive, clever, kind, though he lacks some of Gary's sex appeal. Gary presses Kismet again and again, in quite coercive and abusive ways, into marrying him, but after the wedding, Kismet feels trapped in his parents' large farmhouse. In the margin, other crises rear their heads. Kismet's father disappears, leaving a mysterious mortgage on their property. And the dirt that has supported the local sugar beet crop--from which the Geists derive their fortune, and which supports just about everyone in the region--has become hostile through the overuse of pesticides.

Traditionally, I read fiction by Indigenous authors in January, to get into the mindset of my second semester senior class. In practice, that means I almost always start the year with Louise Erdrich, who is more or less unrivalled among Native American authors still writing in the U.S.A. Erdrich has been going through a kind of late period Renaissance lately, publishing a novel nearly every other year, winning the Pulitzer Prize. I was pleased to get to hear her read from The Mighty Red a few months ago in Brooklyn, and the church hall where she read was entirely full. And yet, The Mighty Red confirmed for me a feeling that Erdrich's late novels haven't quite matched up to her earlier ones, though they share much of the same superficial trappings. A couple of pivotal scenes in The Mighty Red, in which the parents of Hugo and Gary confront one another regarding Kismet's affections, take place at book clubs meetings. (Funnily, the first book is Eat Pray Love and the next The Road.) But it also gave me an unpleasant feeling that The Mighty Red is not unlike the kind of book you might read at a book club (sadly, derogatory).

It's hard to say why I felt this book was so unsatisfying. It might be that the most intriguing theme here--the depletion of the soil because of the deleterious practices of big agribusiness, which is linked to the kind of dystopian future captured in The Road--never gets fully drawn into the light. The central focus is on Kismet's mistake of marrying Gary, and while this story has its highlights, it left the book feeling sort of static and motionless to me, because of the way Kismet is borne along by Gary's desire, unable to assert herself or make any positive choices. A subplot in which Kismet's father, Martin, reappears as a bank robber who dresses in a different theatrical outfit--old lady, elf, nun--for each robbery points toward some of Erdrich's boldness and humor. Short chapters and quickly shifting vantage points left the book feeling rather unfocused to me, and I never really thought that Erdrich was able to bring together all the novel's various strands into something that felt whole.

This is the eleventh (!) of Erdrich's books that I've read. It's probably the least satisfying. But that's OK. It's always a pleasure to return to Erdrich's North Dakota, even if it's not the best of visits. One of my hopes is that sometime she'll return to the historical fiction that feels, at least to me, her strength.