READER’S REVIEW
This month’s review is by Renee Kahl
The Mighty Red
By Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich, author of twenty-nine novels and countless short stories, has been a major indigenous literary voice since 1984. She is known for her strong Ojibwa consciousness, weaving magical realism from tribal sacred stories throughout her fiction, and for strong symbolism rooted in nature reflecting a primal connection to the land. The latter two are found in abundance here, but only a bit of Ojibwa lore is thrown in toward the end of this sprawling story and the real theme is the primal connection we all have to the land. The Mighty Red, whose namesake is the Red River in North Dakota, is only minimally about Native American issues, instead revolving principally around the environmental degradation caused by industrial sugar beet farming in the Red River Valley.
Set in 2008, this is an episodic, meandering tale, circling like a river through the lives of a huge cast of characters. The central ones, teen-age Kismet Poe and her mother Crystal Frechette, are Ojibwa residents of a small farming community divided between descendents of the historic natives, the “workers,” and “those who own the land.” Crystal is beginning to show physical wear from her job trucking sugar beets for the Geist farm; the Geists’ son Gary is feverishly trying to get Kismet to marry him. Kismet’s Ojibwa father, Martin, a dilettante actor and sometime investment advisor, floats in and out of the story with madcap adventures, apparently having absconded with a large community church fund, to the disgrace of Kismet and Crystal. The popular and handsome Gary has a dark secret, hinted at during much of the story. Trapped by the humiliation of her father’s actions, Kismet marries Gary, devastating both Crystal and Hugo, the boy she really loves, then immediately regrets it.
The current absence of birds is the subject of constant comment in the community. Kismet learns from her father-in-law, beet farmer Diz, that the sugar beet co-ops receive glyphosate (Roundup) and specially engineered beet seeds resistant to it under contracts with the chemical companies. Diz applies industrial-size drums of it to clear the fields of all competing vegetation and achieve perfect, sterile rows of beet seeds in their “chemical dust.” In some of the most glorious prose of the book, Kismet observes the contrast between this impoverished soil and the original lush valley ecosystem. At a neighboring farm laboring to bring back the old ways, she is transfixed for hours before “a shaggy field” teeming with native trees, flowers, insects and tons of birds.
“barn swallows, tree swallows, swifts were plucking insects off the tops of the flowers and grasses … 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 that 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 so dark and dazzling that Kismet was lost in emotion. She sat under a spell… practically everything she and the Geists did, and even her mother’s job, was destroying what she had just witnessed, the joinery of creation.”
There is a lot of prose like this; sadly, its force is diminished by the fact that Erdrich simply tries to include too much. Development of characters and their relationships is diluted. The teenage romances and Martin’s distracting antics take up too large a chunk of the book, and several scenes supposedly slapstick hilarious just aren’t. This is clearly the work of a major writer, but I suspect it is not her strongest.
The obvious does not go unmentioned; namely, that all this is occurring on land stolen from the original Native Americans, but despite the comments of some, this is not a commentary on “settler colonialism.” It is a lyrical and very effective warning about modern industrialized farming practices.
CALL # STATUS: NEW SHELF FIC ERDRICH