Published in October 2024, Louise Erdrich’s 19th novel, “The Mighty Red” is a raucous Shakespearean tragicomedy, a refreshingly new and pertinent narrative from a modern Midwestern author who counts the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among her accolades.
There is something of the autobiographical in Erdrich’s new novel. Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Like her protagonist Kismet, Erdrich tried her hand as a waitress and a short order cook before becoming a writer; like Kismet’s mother Crystal, Erdrich also spent time working on sugar beet farms in North Dakota, which are a central motif in the novel.
Also like Kismet and Crystal, Erdrich is a descendant of the Ojibwe people, and is not afraid to frame issues of landownership in the context of settler colonialism in her novel. These tensions extend into the dynamics between Kismet and her Caucasian in-laws, the Geists, painting the ever-present reality of a North Dakota affected by neocolonialism.
As recently as February 2022, there have been lawsuits challenging the state of North Dakota over such issues: Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians (of which Erdrich is an enrolled member) v. Michael Howe (Secretary of State of North Dakota) was a case brought by two Native American tribes claiming that the state was purposely diluting reservations’ voters’ voting strength in their redistricting plans in violation of past voting rights acts.
In her novel, Erdrich writes: “There were big-time owners and there were workers. It had been like that since the Red River Valley was settled. First the land was taken from the Dakota, the Ojibwe, the Métis, by forced treaties. Then the original people started working on the land they had once owned.”
Erdrich’s novel is inspired by “Madame Bovary,” but Gustave Flaubert’s rural French provincial scenery is replaced with the sugar-beet farms of Tabor, North Dakota, which are emblematic of the changes in landownership in the region. Both Winnie and Diz come from a lineage of farmers, and the symbolic significance of Kismet’s servitude to the Geists echoes tensions between Native Americans and white settlers.
The parallels don’t end there. Erdrich’s protagonist Kismet is a contemporary Midwestern answer to Flaubert’s Emma; both women are bored, trapped, and restless, finding themselves in claustrophobic and loveless marriages without really knowing how they got there.
But where Emma’s actions are largely hedonistic and self-centered, Kismet becomes a Cinderella-before-the ball figure for the Geist family, acting as both a physical and psychological caretaker for erratic mother-in-law Winnie, emotionally abstinent father-in-law Diz and impulsive, disturbed husband Gary.
Kismet’s captors, the Geists, are a wealthy beet-farming family struck by tragedy after a night involving Gary, his friends, hard liquor and snowmobiles, from which Gary emerges (physically) unscathed, whereas some of Gary’s school pals and football teammates are not so lucky.
Tabor’s female community is brought together in weekly book club meetings where town gossip and drama are rife, and literary discussion is rare. For the first part of the novel, the gossip revolves around Gary, “eighteen years old and pressed for time”, and his fumbling and hurried proposal to Kismet, “his girlfriend, who said she was not his girlfriend,” both fresh out of high school. The initial proposal scene echoes Flaubert’s satire of romanticism which dominates “Madame Bovary”:
“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.
‘Ahhh, ahhh, ahhh,’ she managed.
‘Yeah? Did you say yeah? You said yeah!’
Gary threw himself across the storage console and the cup holder and was on her, weeping in a frenzy, ‘Yes, yes, yes, oh my god I love you I’ll do anything.’ […] For surely this was love, thought Kismet, this was the heights. She had conquered him.”
Later, the gossip turns to Martin, Kismet’s father, as he is accused of stealing from the church’s renovation funds following his sudden disappearance. Crystal, Kismet’s mother and Martin’s wife, finds herself under suspicion of collusion by the hivemind townspeople and under the watchful eye of a bashful and awkward FBI agent, whom she befriends.
The novel is full of these farcical, desultory relationships and interactions, teetering on the brink of the outlandishly ludicrous and funny, and the cumbersome, tangible reality of life in a rural Midwestern town. Erdrich, a Midwesterner herself, bluntly asserts in her novel: “Boredom was a part of small-town life that you had to get drunk to accept.” Kismet, precocious and determined, sees college as an escape from this boredom, an escape foiled by her marriage to Gary.
As well as being a hilarious, dramatic, calamitous narrative, “The Mighty Red” is ultimately a testament to its Midwestern environment. The name of the novel refers to the Red River of North Dakota, an almost deific force which both gives and takes life in Erdrich’s novel. She juxtaposes the natural beauty of the Red River Valley with the steps man has taken to destroy it for selfish gain:
“These [glacial water sources] were common when North Dakota was responsibly inhabited, when dinosaur bones lay on the surface of Hell Creek and the Nile of the North, the Red River, was muddy but pure. Now, in the valley, the aquifer was being tapped out to make perfect potatoes for McDonald’s fries. There were no more secret bubbling springs.”
With “The Mighty Red”, Erdrich continues an authentic Midwestern literary tradition, both drawing from its rich history and addressing relevant, contemporary problems of the region. She does so with a wonderful vitality which makes us hopeful for the future of the literary scene of the Midwest.
