On its surface, “The Mighty Red,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Louise Erdrich, is a love story turned on its head. It begins not with a tentative meeting but with a diamond ring. Eighteen-year-old Gary Geist plans on marrying his high school girlfriend, Kismet Poe, so travels from his farm in the Red River Valley to a jeweler’s store in Fargo, N.D., to pick out a “wearable fleck of eternity.” He is a jock; she is bookish. His mother, Winnie, is ecstatic about the union; hers, Crystal, distraught. After three proposals, the girl caves, and the Geists organize a wedding. Alas, the bride is sleeping with her friend Hugo.
“The Mighty Red” is the latest of the prolific author’s many novels to deal with questions of inheritance and identity, mapping the impacts of past injustices on present-day inequalities. (Her previous novel, “The Sentence,” featured a white woman masquerading as Indigenous.) Like Erdrich herself, Crystal and Kismet are Ojibwe; Crystal works on the land, while the Geists — who are white — own it, their enormous agribusiness bleeding the soil dry. Erdrich juxtaposes a scene in which the Geists “eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth,” lambsquarters, from their monoculture sugar beet fields, with one of Crystal lovingly preparing the greens with virgin olive oil. The message is clear: Capitalism is killing the earth.
This is a novel of the collective, in which the emblematic diamond informs the structure of the work — facets of the story are illuminated from character to character. And as a Red River Valley community emerges, the family narrative is skillfully entwined with the political and ecological. It is set during the economic crash of 2008-9, and we hear from Kismet’s father, Martin, a stage actor who has a fondness for Brecht and fraudulently remortgages Crystal’s house and takes off with the money before his daughter’s wedding.
Kismet’s name means destiny, though it is not clear whether she is mistress of hers or swept along by something more formidable. She is with Gary rather than Hugo because the former is popular and good-looking, and the latter bookish like her, home-schooled and goofy. Such socially mediated concerns can be all-consuming for teenagers, but Erdrich’s exploration of Kismet’s motives never fully uncovers this strange decision, and besides, the scales quickly fall from the character’s eyes. In the aftermath of an accident, Gary reveals first his impetuousness, flipping the car on the way to their new house, and then his seediness, calling her a “slut” while trying to seduce her. That night, while Gary sleeps, Kismet sneaks into town to visit the bookstore and her lover, Hugo. He is reading “Madame Bovary”: an adulterers’ manual.
Occasionally, delightfully, as with the gemstone, Erdrich steps into the long past, apprising us of the geology of the region, its farming history, the fate of the herds of buffalo so vast they would take three days to pass. She connects the financial crash to 1929, even to Weimar Germany. All this embeds a local narrative into the deep currents of time: “Like the mighty red, history was a flood.” To become rich and steal Kismet away from Gary, Hugo takes a job with an oil company, burrowing through the millenniums to extract black gold. Erdrich labels the many toxic chemicals involved in this task, hinting at their impact on the water supply.
These interludes bind the work together, transforming an immersive domestic drama into one that, like much of Erdrich’s oeuvre, speaks to the acrimony at the heart of the American national project.
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