Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich (1954 - ) is a novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, memoirist, and young adult-and-children’s book writer. She is also a bookseller in the retail sense, the owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I remember reading short stories by her in Atlantic Monthly in the late 70s, confident and powerful stories, exotic for being set in contemporary Chippewa communities in the upper Midwest. Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Nation, matrilineally descended. She was Dartmouth ‘76, the first class of women at the college. A writer since childhood, she arrived on the American literary scene practiced and graceful and eloquent — and has only fulfilled and transcended the promise of those early stories, which became the novel Love Medicine (1984).
The novel before The Sentence (2021), The Night Watchman (2020), won the Pulitzer Prize.
The Mighty Red
The Mighty Red
A FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION
In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people’s lives.
History is a flood. The mighty red . . .
In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding.
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.
Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.
Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own.
Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.
The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.
A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.