Book Review: The Mighty Red

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

Harper | 2024 | Hardcover, $32.00. Paperback forthcoming 

5 Stars

A longlist selection for the 35th Annual Reading the West Awards

I’ll admit having a difficult time getting into this one. It was difficult to track the individual woes and complaints of the characters, difficult to understand the context and the actions, the (apparently) petty grievances they all seemed to carry against each other.

This novel about an agricultural community centers around the aftermath of the tragic deaths of two high schoolers, and the shocking theft of money from the church renovation fund. We see how this community, set in their ways and asleep to their flaws, copes with these incidents: not well.  

As is often the case with a Louise Erdrich novel, the world we enter is complicated and tangled, and we get just a hint of that complexity as we enter the community. We get quarrels that we can tell are old, but that seem as tiresome to us as they must be to the people on the fringes. Often, scenes are broken up over multiple chapters as they shift perspective from person to person. Such as this one, at book club:

Bev held up Eat Pray Love, chosen by Mary Sotovine. But before she could open her mouth, Darva Geist held up her hand and said they really had to address Gusty’s digestive issues.

 ‘Fiber,” said Tiny.

 ‘Moving on,” said Bev.”

The next chapter, “Moving On” begins without even a beat in the scene.

“I have a question.”

Karleen Krankheit raised her hand.

“Here we go,’ muttered Jeniver.

Everyone remembered Karleen’s attempts to jettison them for one reason or another and they lay in wait, eyeing her, breathing silently. In some hearts there was anticipation. Who would she target this time?”

In these few lines, we get a strong sense of what the people in this community are like. We see that they are used to each other, that they know what to expect from each other, and some of them even take pleasure in the suffering of others, as if they are eating popcorn and watching an entertaining Real Housewives episode. 

We learn, also, that people in the community look for a single person to blame, or for a single person to fix the mess. Whether it’s Winnie wanting Kismet to fix her son and herself, or the town wanting Crystal’s blood or money, since they can’t find her husband who allegedly stole the church renovation fund, most want to look at everyone but themselves as the source of the problem. 

Perhaps that’s why I struggled to get into the book at first, as the lack of self-awareness and lack of accountability is something I see too frequently in daily life. 

As the book went on, though, and more context was revealed, the community woke up. They started to become aware of the issues, to see that they all needed to have a hand in fixing what was wrong, to see that they had to make amends for wrongs done, and to let go of grievances, dreams, and fears. 

The first page of the novel holds this beautiful passage:

The Red River of the North is young. From the sky it looks like a length of string arranged on a flat board in a tight scrawl of twisting loops. The river gathers in the Ottertail and Bois de Sioux rivers and runs north on a slight incline from Wahpeton to Winnipeg. The river is muddy, opaque with sediment and toxic from field runoff. Not a river you’d swim but good to fish, at least at its source. The river is changeable, a slow and sleepy trickle in summer, rampaging like a violent toddler in spring, when it sweeps across the land reflecting the sky like its mother--a vast prehistoric lake. Over millennia, the waters have given the Red River Valley earth its blackness, its life. The River is shallow, it is deep, I grew up there, it is everything.

We know the river is central to the story, we know it’s central to the lives of the people, based on this passage, yet the river doesn’t actually play much of a role in the novel itself. The Mighty Red is the name of the football team, and the river and its water comes up from time to time, with worries about contamination from the agricultural chemical runoff. The river took the lives of the two teens, but it wasn’t really the river that did it, it was human carelessness. 

Through the course of the novel, we realize that everything is interconnected; even when the river isn’t mentioned, the river is there, as it is the source of all life for the human and nonhuman creatures living in the valley. 

Walking among trees was her favorite thing. Here at the edge of the homestead there were large cottonwood trees, some scruffy box elders, roiling masses of chokecherry, even wild plum and old apple trees with bitter, gnarled fruit still clinging to the branches. She stopped and leaned against a tree, listening to the clatter of the cottonwood leaves, staring at the flat gray fields. The baby beet plants, coddled in their chemical dust, stretched row after row into the shimmer of tomorrow’s heat, and she thought the order of the earth, beneath the unpredictable sky, and the tangle behind her, was exquisite. (193)

The sharp contrast between the tangle of trees and the clean, organized fields is one moment of revelation among several, where the sterility of organization is not a sign of life, but instead a sign of order, but an order that only lives on the surface. 

Kismet, one of the central characters, is the one who seems to have many of these revelations. Such as this one,

They took their lawn chairs over to the prairie field that Eric and his dad had been working on for years. Barn swallows, tree swallows, swifts, were plucking insects off the tops of the flowers and grasses. The sun was low and the light was a golden barge floating through the trees… The light softened and shadows crept out of the trees. The evening breeze in green twilight set up a soft clatter in the cottonwoods. She gasped, suddenly, for pain shot through her at the widening arc of her knowing. She had seen a lot by now — the deadened dirt, the perfect row crops without bugs or weeds. She had talked to Diz about how this perfection was accomplished. She could see it now. Practically everything she and the Geists did, and even her mother’s job, was destroying what she had just witnessed, the joinery of creation. (237 - 238)

As so often happens with Erdrich, I begin the novel confused, sometimes irritated or impatient with the characters. As I get to know them, though, and as I get to know the land on which they reside, learning their history, their flaws, their mistakes, I see the beauty, the mischief, and I leave the pages with a sigh, changed in a way I can’t quite articulate. 

Every time I read a book by her, I’m glad I did. Every time, my heart expands with grief, and also with hope.