The Pulitzer Prize Winning author’s new book hits stores today

By Katherine Xiong

Louise Erdrich is considered one of the preeminent literary fiction writers in America today; her 2020 novel “The Night Watchman” won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet the opening of her latest novel, “The Mighty Red,” reads like a parody of a YA coming-of-age novel, complete with an unexpected, teenage love triangle between a jock, a nerd, and a manic pixie dream girl. In “The Might Red,” Erdrich folds remarkable beauty into the absurd.

“The Mighty Red’s” melodrama centers on three teenaged, archetypal characters. First, the jock, Gary, a white high school football star, is set to inherit his family’s sugar beet farm. This uneasy inheritance, along with a shadowy tragedy he won’t talk about, have driven him to propose to the manic pixie dream girl, Kismet, who he barely knows.

Second, Kismet, an intelligent social outcast at school, comes from a much less wealthy Native American family (her mother Crystal hauls sugar beets for Gary’s family) and flits anxiously between the prospects of college and marriage. Third, Kismet’s other suitor, homeschooled and aspiring engineer Hugo, is closer to her in class and in ambition (he hopes to striking it rich in oil) and he’s just as desperate for Kismet as Gary is. 

This drama is set against the backdrop of a poor, rural North Dakota town on the Red River of the North, whose sugar beet farming practices deplete the land of nutrients and poison the land and its people with industrial pesticides (Erdrich, a lifelong midwesterner and member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, has written extensively about such environmental injustices in previous novels).

Poverty, complex racial relations, unsustainable farming practices on stolen native lands, and the 2008 recession all raise the stakes of this teen romance. Erdrich gives the characters little time to figure things out. Like the Red River for which the novel is named (and where some of the novel’s most dramatic events take place), the plot moves swiftly and unpredictably creating results both profound and absurd.  

“The Mighty Red” is Erdrich’s attempt to fit these storms in a teacup of a novel. She anchors the financial, social, and environmental stakes in the characters’ lives, but it takes some time for the reader to become accustomed to her unique blend of absurdity and sincerity. Take, for example, this inner monologue from Hugo (the nerd) about 30 pages in: 

Beneath his feet were boards. Beneath the boards a basement dug from a thirty-foot-deep tranche of topsoil and reinforced with common fieldstones, or glacial erratics. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, a geologist endlessly named Henri Louis Frederic de Saussure noted boulders of a foreign granite scattered on top of limestone high in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. Terrain erratique,’ he called them, using the Latin words erratus and terra to mean ‘ground that has wandered.’ The term was still used to describe stones left behind by glacial ice.

‘That is my heart, thought Hugo. ‘My heart propelled into place by a massive force and left here, a lonely erratic.‘

The passage is beautiful, evocative of the novel’s preoccupation with land, and indicative of how this novel entangles the individual with their surrounding environmental, social, and economic realities. It’s also impossible to take seriously, as it is the melodramatic inner monologue of a teenaged boy in love. 

This tongue-in-cheek writing style endures for about 100 pages, during which none of the characters come across as particularly likable, and the reader is uncertain how seriously to take the story. By the time we meet Gary, his adolescent desperation has consumed him to the point that he only thinks about Kismet.

Hugo is hardly any better, deriving all his motivation from a sense of entitlement to Kismet. Perhaps this is believable teenage boy behavior, but it’d make more sense if Kismet had a discernible personality rather than the “manic pixie dream girl” trope. Even the sections that follow her from her own point-of-view do little to elevate her character. 

As soon as the recession hits the novel shines. Kismet faces the realities of marriage and Hugo struggles to survive the danger and brutality of working in the oil industry. Gary can no longer outrun the haunting, encroaching truth of his personal tragedy. Their parents’ background dramas expand just as quickly, including (but not limited to) fights over dangerous new pesticides, bank robberies in increasingly hilarious disguises, a defrauded church’s renovation fund. 

The reader comes to feel both for these immature kids, forced to carry the hopes of entire families as they play-act at adulthood and also for their parents, all of whom are struggling to make life work in the wake of economic disaster. That said, one can’t help but laugh at how these dramas play out. 

“The Mighty Red” is startlingly frank, refreshingly raunchy, and fiercely contemporary in its engagement with modern environmental and economic struggle. It refuses to fit into a literary box, which seems to be Erdrich’s intention. “The times were pleasant but also desperate,” she writes, after all. “This was the world.” 

The Mighty Red | By Louise Erdrich | Harper | Oct 1, 2024 | 384 pp. | $28

Katherine Xiong is a writer and Buffalo Hive book critic. you can find more information about her and her work here.