Louise Erdrich is a national treasure. I’d read only two of her books, The Round House and LaRose, and both were gorgeous, deeply emotional without being sentimental, suffused with the spirit and environment of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Native Americans to which Erdrich belongs.
The Mighty Red, while quite good, is not one of her best.
The title refers to the Red River (of the North, distinct from the Texas river of the same name) that flows through North Dakota, through fertile land that is now mostly growing sugar beets. In this valley lives Crystal, a poor but very capable sugar-beet truck driver, married to Martin, and mother of the beguiling Kismet. The town also has a collection of young men over whom lies the heavy shadow of a party two years ago during which two of the boys had died and one is permanently maimed.
[Mr Speck, a high-school teacher, to Gary] When you did this you created ripped guts, torn hearts, brains overflowing with grief in three families, not to mention huge numbers of friends and even acquaintances in this small, close-knit town. In these families you created a large dark slash of grief and that, young Gary, never heals. There is always a soft crater of agony in a family after that. [..]
Young Gary Geist, to whom the teacher is speaking, is from a well-to-do family. Cocksure, football quarterback, careless, he has not been ‘quite right’ since the events of that awful day. Gary and his friend Eric are both in love with Kismet, who is not exactly pretty but has ‘fire’, and a chapter or two into the novel, Gary sort-of-proposes to her.
He’d lost weight since last March and the hollows in his cheeks gave him an eerie authority. Kismet tried to turn away, but she couldn’t move. His desperation paralyzed her. He grasped her hand, wouldn’t let go, and before she could react the ring was on her finger.
Also in love with Kismet (who isn’t?!) is Hugo, the son of Bev and Ichor. Bev runs a used-bookstore that only survives because of the customers who routinely buy and return romance novels. Ichor is a farmer who has understood the hideous effect of commercial fertilizers, pesticides, RoundupReady seeds, and invasive weeds on the environment, and is switching to organic farming. Hugo is clearly the sweetest young man in the novel: homeschooled, gentle, brilliant, reads everything under the sun, and has a plan for his future.
The Geist family stand in contrast. Winnie, the mother, is troubled and has not cleaned her house since the fatal party. Diz, the father is casually rough. And Gary is wild: oblivious to the dangers he creates for others. For most of the book, Hugo’s and Gary’s families are exactly opposites, which seems oddly simplistic for Erdrich.
Erdrich’s novels (that I’ve read) have focused on the ripples caused by an event in a community — how it affects not just the immediate participants but their families and their community, and how nothing is ever quite the same afterwards. The Mighty Red, too, goes around and around the fateful party, hinting at what might have happened, until rather abruptly all is revealed near the end.
Crystal and Hugo are well-drawn and appealing characters, but unfortunately, the other characters are not as well developed. Kismet is at the center of this novel, and is immensely capable but confoundingly helpless in the face of major decisions about her own life. Gary is thoroughly obnoxious for most of the book, and Winnie is needy and controlling, but after the full story comes out, the reader may develop some sympathy for them. Martin abruptly vanishes leaving Crystal and Kismet in a financial mess (with a rather convenient conclusion eventually), but I never got a sense of his motivations. Eric, one of the young men, is charming and likeable, but even the chapter in his voice never quite lets the reader into his personality.
The heart of this novel is the environmental destruction caused by large-scale farming practices.
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. [..] 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.
There were a lot of stories in this novel — the personal, the community, the environment — which made it rather disconnected and unfocused. The chapters are of widly varying lengths, some just a page, some several pages dense, and bouncing from character to character, which adds to the confusion. Some characters, like Gary’s friend Charley, remain ciphers. That said, even a lesser Erdrich novel is pretty darn good. The scenes at the book club meeting were delightfully tart, and her descriptions of the land are evocative.
As the heat rose off the earth the insects rose too, and the black arcs of birds began to feed with such swiftness and intensity that Kismet’s eyes could scarcely follow. They outflew their shadows, veered so close and at such a rate of speed it seemed at every second they would collide, but only their shadows merged and came apart. Their intricate blur of flight rose to a frenzied joy dark and dazzling.
This review sent me back – the Red River, flowing north to Canada, was a few blocks by bike from my childhood homes, not so mighty as it meandered around golf courses and city parks in the summer, raging destructively some springs and in winter, frozen almost solid so one could walk across it to Minnesota (at its narrower points). I woke most mornings to the ‘aroma’ of sugar beets being processed a few miles away into “Crystal Sugar” – the brand synomous with sugar in those parts. The larger the white clouds billowing from the plant’s stacks, the stronger the stench. Looking forward to reading this one by Erdrich – I’m sure the 8-week library hold (!) will …fly by.
Erdrich describes the stench of the sugar beets at several points in the book, definitely quite intense.
In our library too, all her books have long holds.