Erdrich’s evocative new novel probes the dynamics of relationships in familiar settings (2024)

Erdrich’s evocative new novel probes the dynamics of relationships in beautifully familiar settings

By: Reviewed by Neil BesnerPosted:

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Since 1984’s Love Medicine, the first of her 18 novels, award-winning author Louise Erdrich has been ranging ever more broadly and deeply across the contours of her homeland — here, as the title of The Mighty Red signals, centred on the river that has so powerfully inscribed itself on this landscape and its generations.

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Since 1984’s Love Medicine, the first of her 18 novels, award-winning author Louise Erdrich has been ranging ever more broadly and deeply across the contours of her homeland — here, as the title of The Mighty Red signals, centred on the river that has so powerfully inscribed itself on this landscape and its generations.

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Since 1984’s Love Medicine, the first of her 18 novels, award-winning author Louise Erdrich has been ranging ever more broadly and deeply across the contours of her homeland — here, as the title of The Mighty Red signals, centred on the river that has so powerfully inscribed itself on this landscape and its generations.

As always, Erdrich’s hybrid ancestry — she is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and descended from German-American roots on her father’s side — richly informs her many-layered exploration both of her characters and the land. As always, her characters are driven by love and desire often thwarted, diverted or distorted. And as always, Erdrich’s mastery over language, evident on every page, surprises, arrests and provokes with every lucent turn of phrase.

Every new Erdrich novel probes more incisively into the dynamics of relationships — between children and parents, between married couples, among lawyers and bankers and priests and farmers and eccentrics. The Mighty Red anatomizes the stations of marriage, from ardent proposal through long-suffering marital ennui to the surprising returns of departed spouses or lovers. Along the way, Erdrich lays bare the inner lives of her characters with a compassion that is at once surgically incisive and omniscient; the twinned perspective invites readers both inside and beyond the characters’ dilemmas.

The plot of The Mighty Red turns, first, upon the progress of the courtship of a troubled teen, Gary Geist, and the prophetically named Kismet, who is at best ambivalent about him. As Erdrich follows their unlikely union and its devolution, we learn of Kismet’s mother Crystal’s apprehensions about the relationship and follow the rupture of her own idiosyncratic marriage to Martin, who has apparently absconded mid-novel with much of the wider community’s savings.

Meanwhile, Kismet is drawn strongly to another young man, Hugo, who leaves her and their passionate but clandestine relationship to seek his fortune. Hugo works in a bookstore — another familiar and redolent setting in the fiction of Erdrich (who herself owns a bookstore in Minneapolis) — while the wider world of beet farming (again, an Erdrich familiar) superintends everyone’s fate.

Everywhere, Erdrich’s prose invites her readers to pause over the sheer drama of her phrasing. The narrative is eminently quotable — here is Hugo, on his way from his parents’ place to buy a second-hand car: “From the highway into the mournful tree-lined secret streets of the lost south side of the tracks, small houses and big box elders, maples, Siberian elms, a few massive indomitable oaks shaking their branches at the iron sky.”

Accenting the drama of the evocative language, the novel is composed in very short sections, ranging from a half-page to four, each entitled and each both self-contained and driven forward by the gathering force of the characters’ entanglements. In their turn, these short sections are assembled into “Parts,” each also appropriately but ironically entitled (“The Proposal,” “Vows,” “Honeymoon,” The Wedding Dinner”) that gather their own cumulative and increasingly ominous impetus towards the novel’s dark revelation.

The sense of foreboding is masterfully paced; we are aware from the outset that something is amiss with Gary Geist’s infatuation with Kismet, but only late in the narrative are the details revealed. The same is true of Martin’s disappearance; it is as if these major elements of plot are backdrops to the wider drama governed by the rhythms of the natural landscape, the river, the weather and the seasons, the generations that play out through characters’ individual dilemmas.

It is important not to upstage Erdrich’s revelation, because its appearance late in the narrative is exactly where it should arise. The titular river is been a major character throughout The Mighty Red, but to what end, and of what kind or degree, must be left to the novel’s masterful rhythms.

Like the river, Erdrich remains at the height of her powers.

Neil Besner taught Love Medicine at the University of Winnipeg in the last century.

The Mighty Red: A Novel

By Louise Edrich

HarperCollins, 384 pages, $26

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Erdrich’s evocative new novel probes the dynamics of relationships in familiar settings (2024)

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