Just do it

Louise Erdrich’s novels have always been regional in the best sense. Among the small towns, Indigenous communities and rugged tracts of North Dakota, she has discovered a canvas to paint something like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, and has spent the better part of her career peopling her landscape and drawing out its rich, often bloody history. Whether her novels are set in the early days of the twentieth century or, as with her latest, The Mighty Red, in the twenty-first, the collision between the Indigenous Anishinaabe and the descendants of European colonists remains central. The result is an oeuvre that dramatizes the sometimes subtle, sometimes spectacular violence of imperial capitalism’s westward conquest and illuminates the boldness and resilience of a people who persevere against the greatest possible odds.

This is Erdrich’s nineteenth novel, written with her world-building muscles fully flexed. We return to the (fictional) town of Argus, North Dakota, which first appeared in her early novels. This is an agricultural community whose members throw sunflowers instead of rice at weddings, but by 2008, when the action begins, farming is a thoroughly industrial vocation, the sugar beet and corn fields treated with Gramoxone, which destroys livers and kidneys, and atrazine, which taints well water and shrinks male genitals. This is a disenchanted landscape. Even the mighty Red River, “the Nile of the North”, is “a treacherous brown vein of trifluralin, atrazine, polychlorinated biphenyls”. In this land of despoilation thoughts of apocalypse are always near the surface, and characters daydream of a future in which derelict highways and buildings “under vast pressure … become some kind of aggregate stone”, the geology of a landscape that will go on for ever without us.

When Erdrich is at her best, her characters rise to meet the grandeur of their environment. If The Mighty Red should be classed among her less successful novels, it is because the people and their situations feel flimsy and improvised in comparison to their robustly constructed world. The story centres on an ill-begotten marriage between two kids just out of high school: Gary Geist, a white boy from a wealthy agricultural family, and Kismet Poe, “descended from Ojibwe field hands, potato pickers, dedicated bootleggers”. Gary was captain of the football team, while Kismet is a bookish goth, and, based on these contours, the reader can more or less colour in the remaining details of their characters. Kismet’s mother, Crystal, a trucker who performs the “hard, bone-rattling work” of hauling sugar beets, is set against the marriage; Gary’s parents are all for it. To shake things up a little, Kismet is conducting an affair with Hugo, a poor, romantic outsider who works at the local bookstore.

Around this love triangle orbits a wide array of characters, and the novel sometimes seems designed by free association as Erdrich picks up a thread and pursues it away from the main action. There is a mysterious, possibly fatal accident that Gary and his football team were previously involved in, constantly alluded to, but only described much later on, while Kismet’s father, an amateur actor named Martin, absconds with the local church’s sizeable renovation fund, then turns up on the news as a bank robber. It often feels as though Erdrich doesn’t quite know where she wants these threads to lead. In one scene it is revealed that Martin secretly took out a mortgage on Kismet and Crystal’s house; then the mortgage appears to be a scam; then it’s real again. Or maybe not.

This inconsistency isn’t limited to the peripheral action. It invades the central love triangle. The key event is Kismet’s wedding to Gary, but why she would ever marry him is never persuasively established. While the townsfolk treat him like some kind of golden boy – “Gary calls the plays and the rest of us take the hits”, says one teammate – on the page he is inept and uncharismatic. In one preposterous scene he goes to the bookstore to ask Hugo, his romantic rival, if he stocks books on improving sexual technique. Hugo and Kismet, meanwhile, are a match made in heaven; they exchange books, they have great sex, and Kismet gives him a quilt she has sewn out of her favourite T-shirts, a gesture so romantic that it actually turns the reader against her, as she seems to be messing with his mind.

But this doesn’t seem to be the author’s intention. The novel wants its readers to feel that Kismet – the only goth in the village – is trapped by convention, “taking on the cross of womanhood before her time”. One of the novels Hugo gives her is Madame Bovary. Yet the door to her gilded domestic cage is left wide open; there is no apparent obstacle to her being with Hugo; and Louise Erdrich has to stretch scenes past credulity to keep her attached to Gary. When Kismet brings up leaving, Gary “began to shake … and the way he begged her to stay was wrenching”. This sounds like a perfectly normal break-up. Just do it.

Michael LaPointe has written for the Atlantic and the New Yorker. His debut novel, The Creep, was published in 2021

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