A seemingly doomed wedding is the focal point of Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red, a propulsive novel that further justifies this Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s acclaim. Time and time again, with just a few words of perfectly placed description—like “the layaway bridal gown hung like an apparition on the outside of the closet door”—Erdrich lends Shakespearean tones to her carefully drawn scenes.
Kismet Poe is a likable, confused teenager who desperately hopes that college will rescue her from the suffocating boredom she feels in Tabor, North Dakota, in 2008. Impulsively, she agrees to marry Gary Geist, a handsome young man who will eventually inherit two giant sugar beet farms. Quarterback Gary, however, is haunted by a tragedy involving his football teammates, the details of which are gradually and tantalizingly revealed. Kismet also remains attracted to another boyfriend, Hugo Dumach—a lovable, smart, homeschooled boy who “long[s] to challenge Gary to a duel.” He works in his mother’s bookstore, but plans to head to the oil fields to earn enough money to win Kismet over. In the meantime, Hugo and Kismet read and discuss Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary as they try to resolve their romantic predicament. “Whatever Emma would do,” Kismet concludes, “I should do the opposite.”
Erdrich is a masterful literary juggler, commanding a richly drawn cast of characters whose encounters overflow with humor and pathos, as well as a variety of compelling storylines. Kismet’s father goes missing, for instance, and seems to have embezzled the church renovation fund. Her mother, Crystal, makes “bread from scratch not because it was artisanal but because it was cheaper.” Crystal and Kismet “had come to know on some level that they were the real Americans—the rattled, scratching, always-in-debt Americans.” These, of course, are the people who populate Erdrich’s many novels.
The title refers to the Red River of the North, which snakes its way through the Red River Valley. This is very much a novel about the land and the people who have farmed it and fought to control it. Erdrich comments on the greed of agribusiness, noting that “this nutritionless white killer,” sugar, “is depleting the earth’s finest cropland.” Yet the book is also, as one character describes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, “about what’s most important . . . this kind of love between a parent and a child.”
With The Mighty Red, Erdrich takes on monumental themes in what just might be a new American classic.