Louise Erdrich’s ‘Mighty Red’ is a tale of land, loss and redemption

In “The Mighty Red,” Louise Erdrich’s enthralling ode and elegy to the people of North Dakota’s Red River Valley, climate change, Big Ag and economic hard times have ravaged the landscape in and around the small town of Tabor during the late aughts. Many of its inhabitants are descendants of the Ojibwe, Dakota and Métis tribes, whose acreage was lost to them in a series of cession treaties over the centuries; they now scramble to make a living, toiling for others on land that was once theirs.

This backdrop could make for a mournful tale of intergenerational trauma and displacement, but Erdrich has other plans for her characters, whom she imbues with the grit and optimism to rise above their challenging circumstances.

Crystal Frechette, for one, works the 12-hour night shift, hauling beets from the Geist farm to a sugar processing plant. It’s backbreaking labor, and sometimes her mind veers dark, until she reminds herself to “Tune your thoughts to a better station.” Crystal devises ingenious ways to stretch her family’s limited budget: She is the breadwinner, as her partner, Martin, has a taste for items like Italian silk ties but earns next to nothing as a traveling theater arts teacher. She’s an expert thrifter and gardener. Rumor has it that her family eats weeds because they’re poor, but to Crystal, one particular “weed,” lambsquarters, is a delicacy: “If only they knew. She clipped the youngest plants, pulled off the leaves. Then she went inside and sauteed them in her most extravagant household purchase — extra-virgin olive oil.”

Crystal named her daughter Kismet “to attract luck and lightness of heart.” Though most of Tabor’s residents are decidedly earthbound, Crystal and Kismet believe in mystical phenomena such as prophecies and omens. And Crystal has a premonition that misfortune is around the corner.

Kismet is a high school senior — intelligent and suddenly popular now that she’s dating Gary Geist, quarterback of the football team. Like her mother, she’s resourceful and no-nonsense, bent on escaping Tabor for college. Despite Kismet’s restlessness and her growing attraction to a bookish friend, she impulsively agrees to marry Gary, who has been haunted after the gruesome deaths of two teammates in a snowmobiling accident. It’s only when he’s with Kismet that the specter never appears. The pair persuade each other they’re in love.

But calamity continues: Kismet’s father absconds under suspicious circumstances, prompting the FBI to swoop in. Most of the townspeople then shun Crystal, suspecting she may be in cahoots with Martin. Crystal, though, is mystified by his disappearance, and enraged when she learns that their already precarious financial picture may be verging on disaster.

It’s 2008, and local businesses are closing, houses are being foreclosed upon, cars are being repossessed. In interviews, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Erdrich has said: “I don’t think about politics when I write. … My novels aren’t op-eds.” But for at least one of this novel’s characters, the faltering economy can be traced back to the budget director under President Reagan, who Erdrich writes “decided to suddenly accelerate, or call in, loans that farmers had previously had decades to repay.”

Winnie Geist, Gary’s mother, knows well the “secret shame of losing all you love.” Her family’s land and home were foreclosed upon, and then taken over by her future husband’s family. Since their marriage, “she had pretended to be a Geist, to live at a level of prosperity that she didn’t believe would last.” But since the snowmobile accident, “some part of her had plunged down that pasture that once belonged to her farm” and “into the river with those boys.”

Erdrich is at her best — as she is here — when she draws on her deep connection with the Great Plains and its Indigenous people. She herself is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and themes of American Indian deprivation and injustice often fuel her storytelling. So do the zest and fortitude of her characters.

It’s also true that in Erdrich’s literary universe, there are few who are beyond redemption. If the villains of “The Mighty Red” are greedy landowners who are poisoning the environment with their herbicides and pesticides, the author doesn’t see them that way. By the end of the novel, Gary is plotting to persuade his dad that a shift to scalable organics is viable and necessary, and we sense that the father’s good nature will lead him that way.

There is an amiable, inviting quality to all of Erdrich’s 19 novels that in part explains how it is possible to be hugely entertained while learning why farmers require increasingly powerful pesticides or what our collective sweet tooth is costing the planet. That accessibility, though, in no way diminishes Erdrich’s unparalleled ability to conjure a scene or a character, or to portray the natural world with awe.

At a friend’s barbecue, Kismet is captivated by the interplay of birds and insects in the prairie field adjoining their backyard: “The sun was low and the light was a golden barge floating through the trees. … As the heat rose off the earth insects rose too, and the black arcs of birds began to feed with such swiftness and intensity that Kismet’s eyes could scarcely follow. … By the time the air cooled and the swallows began to swoop away to their nests, she felt wobbly and strange, as though she too had been flying.”

Erdrich calls on us to heal our frayed bond with the earth, and to regard it, as she does, with wonder.

Leigh Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.