The Mighty Red
Ratings14
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings14
Average rating4.2
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Gorgeous, funny, weird, moving, made me want to claw my face off!!!!
Rural North Dakota, circa 2008-2009. Small-scale tragedies – loss of life, loss of money – have visited the farming community of Tabor. Large-scale tragedies – threats of ecological and economic disaster – are in the air and unavoidable. Inside a full cast of characters from Tabor, we have eighteen year old Kismet Poe, and her mother, Crystal, as the narrative nucleus to Louise Erdrich's The Mighty Red.
The Mighty Red moves quickly, with a straightforward structure of mostly short chapters. Erdrich weaves the characters and plot like the master she is, moving the story forward by keeping most narrative strings under great tension but always allowing for enough revelation and release. There's a solidity to each character and an unshakeable sense of place that cannot be attained by research alone. It can only be borne of a writer with a deep well of experience with such characters and in such a place.
While the characters shine bright, the real star is the land, and the “mighty” Red River which runs through it. Erdrich rages against the monoculture machine bluntly at times, though these on-the-nose critiques are tempered by some lovely metaphorical allusions to returning to the old ways.
There was a major plot twist which I foresaw and felt a bit deflated by, but I should have known better. Erdrich – with glee, I must imagine – later yanked the rug out from under me with a delicious twist within the twist. Outstanding.
The Mighty Red is a novel about loss and despair, about love and resilience. It's about people and the planet, about the ways both will change, and the ways both will not.
