Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Louise Erdrich (“The Night Watchman,” 2021) returns with a story close to her heart, “The Mighty Red.” Set in the author’s native North Dakota, the title refers to the river that serves as a metaphor for life in the Red River Valley. It also carries a secret central to the story’s plot.
The slow reveal of that secret propels a good chunk of the novel, which tells the story of Kismet Poe, a teen girl caught in the middle of a love triangle featuring one of the town’s richest residents (he stands to inherit two lucrative sugar beet farms) and a homeschooled romantic who works at his mom’s bookstore. By page 15, 18-year-old Gary Geist proposes to Kismet, who then tells her mother, “It could be, I think, that I love him.” Pages later, we meet Hugo, who Kismet considers less mature but who built his own computer and has a plan to make lots of money in the oil fields, buy a car and win Kismet’s eternal affection.
Erdrich’s prose is lovely as she describes scenes like this one while Kismet and Gary’s friend Eric watch birds feeding on the prairie: “They outflew their shadows, veered so close and at such a rate of speed it seemed at every second they would collide, but only their shadows merged and came apart. Their intricate blur of flight rose to a frenzied joy so dark and dazzling that Kismet was lost in emotion.”
Part of the story’s emotion comes from the contrast Erdrich establishes between a community that is economically tethered to a crop that is literally killing the earth and its inhabitants. “Sugar is a useless and even harmful substance,” thinks Hugo in a moment of reverie, “and although this nutritionless white killer is depleting the earth’s finest cropland, you forget that when you are eating blueberry crumble.”
There’s a secondary plot that Erdrich spins involving Kismet’s mom, Crystal, and her husband, Martin, who works as a traveling theater arts teacher throughout North Dakota. He disappears one day during the economic meltdown of 2008, along with the church investment fund that he was managing. The plot is played partly for laughs from that point on, but Erdrich does have something to say about how economic downturns impact people like Crystal and Kismet, or as she writes: “real Americans — rattled, scratching always-in-debt Americans.”
There’s lots more here about love and loss and the things people do when they experience the highs and lows of both. The story culminates with more backstory, as Eric and then Gary recount to Kismet what happened one winter night when they and their friends on the high school football team took an inebriated snowmobile ride on the frozen Red River. Erdrich foreshadows it from the start of the book — Gary’s mom wonders if her son has a guardian angel — but when we finally get the truth, it’s a powerful moment, and one that sets the scene for, if not forgiveness, some measure of peace.