“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So begins Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, first published in 1878, the year Russia’s imperial war against the Ottoman Empire concluded – a war that had prompted international alarm about Russian expansionism and fomented internal unrest.
The Mighty Red, the new novel by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich, arrives at a moment with some uncanny historical parallels. Several of her characters read Anna Karenina, and her fiercely political book, like Tolstoy’s, offers its own sweeping canvas of unhappy families, infidelity and farming in an imperial nation.
At the heart of Erdrich’s novel is the centrality of family and the way unhappiness itself can be deeply political.
Review: The Mighty Red – Louise Erdrich (Hachette)
Set in the sugar-beet country of the Red River Valley along the eastern border of North Dakota and the booming oil fields of the state’s remote west, The Mighty Red is a complex drama of intertwined families, each suffering under its own distinct form of unhappiness.
This is country where native bison were hunted almost to extinction by European settlers and where, in our own time, “soil would be chemically altered to grow the beet, and industrial factories would spring up to make the beet into sugar”. As the poisons take hold, characters gradually awaken to the catastrophic changes: to the weird consistency of soils wrecked by chemicals, to the wholesale disappearance of birds and insects, and to unearthly “plumes of flame in the black fields” of oil extraction.
Unhappiness reverberates across the community, becoming toxic. It operates as a shame that Erdrich’s characters feel compelled to hide, usually to the detriment of themselves and everyone around them.
The dramas of a mismatched wedding, a hidden act of criminal recklessness, and the disappearance of the local Catholic Church’s renovation fund dominate the narrative. But these elements are mostly hooks to draw readers into the more serious and often melancholy poetic meditations that become prominent in the novel’s second half.
Erdrich’s larger concerns are a range of interlocking issues that have transformed American life in the years of the book’s unfolding, from the 2008 financial crisis to the present. Among these are the long-term social and environmental consequences of ever more aggressively extractive fuel economies.
The novel addresses corporatised and polluting farming practices driven by the legacies of the Reagan administration’s decision to “call in […] loans that farmers had previously had decades to repay”. It also depicts an agribusiness industry that incentivises the use of herbicides, pesticides and genetically modified seeds at the expense of sustainability and environmental protection.
Alongside these issues, Erdrich explores the retrograde attitudes to gender roles in a rural American community dominated by the Catholic Church, and the insidious ways that race and class entwine to produce profound inequalities of opportunity and power.
Displacement, precarity and cultural capital
The river of the title is “the region’s life giver”, but also the site of fatal disasters and near-misses. It is “a treacherous brown vein of trifluralin, atrazine, polychlorinated biphenyls, VOCs, and mercury, not to mention uprooted trees and sunken cars”.
Red River cuts through land “taken from the Dakota, the Ojibwe, the Métis, by forced treaties”. The “original people” became employees “on the land they once owned”. Erdrich offers a stark vision of displacement, not only of the original owners, but also the migrant farm labourers, whose housing is “burned and the land lasered smooth to grow a few more rows of crops” by the white landowners.
One of Erdrich’s great contributions to contemporary literature is the crafting of complex characters who hail from the economic and social margins of American life. In the hands of many other writers, such subjects are too often reduced to stock caricatures with uniform politics, predictable attitudes to gender, and a tendency to collapse into static crises of self-destruction. Stock working-class characters surrender their agency to resentment, anti-government paranoia or an unnuanced religiosity – or succumb to a ruinous cycle of intoxication and violence.
Erdrich’s characters are more believable for their nuanced and (undoubtedly for some readers) surprising range of attitudes, which run counter to any number of assumptions that continue to be made in media and literature about how farmers, truck drivers and manual labourers live, speak and think.
Among Erdrich’s most significant achievements in The Mighty Red are her depictions of truck driver Crystal Frechette and her bookish ex-goth daughter Kismet Poe, child of failed actor and itinerant drama teacher Martin Poe. The family name, we are told, was once Poésie. It has shortened over the decades so that the poetry has turned into a signifier of narrative darkness (as in, Edgar Allan Poe).
These three characters are “Turtle Mountain people who snagged each other in an oxbow on the Red River and got stuck there, like trash in the tree branches”. (Erdrich herself is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.) Crystal hauls sugar beets from the farm of Winnie and Diz Geist, whose son, high school jock Gary, badgers Kismet into marrying him. In doing so, Kismet turns her back on dropout and autodidact Hugo, a bookstore owner’s son who appears to be her true love.
Crystal and Kismet realise that their precarity frames them in the wider culture as abnormal. They wear “75-percent-off clothing, from Alco, or from Thrifty Life”, while the rich locals shop in “Fargo or Minneapolis” and brag about it. Crystal makes her bread “from scratch not because it was artisanal but because it was cheaper”.
She and her daughter nevertheless “come to know on some level that they were the real Americans – the rattled, scratching, always-in-debt Americans”. Despite it always seeming “that the town well-off were considered the normal ones”, Crystal remains convinced she and her daughter will find a way to “rise” from their state of precarity.
The desire for ascent is, of course, a financial wish. But it is also an impulse towards the acquisition of more substantive cultural capital. These are characters with at least a passing knowledge not only of Tolstoy, but Chekhov, Flaubert, Proust, Brecht and Joan Didion. Such knowledge is rendered as entirely organic to their personalities, arising from particular histories, professions and experiences. Hugo and his mother’s bookstore and book club are key drivers in this area.
Erdrich is making a serious political point that high culture is not the preserve of the coasts, or the middle and upper classes, or white America. It has a real democratic value and purpose. Even “difficult” and “classic” works are accessible to anyone, she seems to be suggesting. All it takes is for such books to be placed within reach of these potential readers.
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary proves to be a consequential negative model. Kismet actively resists falling into the gendered traps Flaubert and Tolstoy set for their heroines. She escapes the fates of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina to live a different kind of life entirely: one in which she seizes her own agency before it is too late.
The power of sentiment
That Erdrich addresses serious world-historical and environmental concerns without the novel feeling laboured is a testament to her talent for balancing a certain kind of engrossing melodrama with flights of rhetorical intervention.
For all its legitimate concerns about masculinity, corporatisation and environmental disaster, The Mighty Red is ultimately a hopeful book. It sees ordinary Americans as essentially good people. When they go wrong, they have the potential to change, redeem themselves and learn to do better – learn to be something more than they thought they were.
That is not to sugarcoat the real darkness, which is abundant and parcelled out over the novel’s length, until the horror that haunts a cluster of the main characters is finally brought to light.
Late in the novel, Erdrich offers a significant clue about how she may be trying to position The Mighty Red when the book club gathers to discuss Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road. As if to suggest McCarthy’s suffocatingly masculine, moralistically Manichean, and reactionarily maudlin novel is the pole against which Erdrich is writing, Kismet offers the most sustained analysis:
I don’t think this book is about the end of the world. That’s just the setting, to show what happens between people in extreme situations. The end is about consolation. The father goes to the end of the earth for his son, then dies, satisfied. I mean, it’s a really sentimental book. And a brutal adventure book […] and then there’s that cannibal army.
The Mighty Red is not a sentimental book, but one that understands the power of sentiment. Nor is it a brutal adventure book, though brutality and adventure feature in its pages. And if there is a cannibal army, it comes in the guise of mass human self-destruction, not least in the way Erdrich frames the sugar-beet industry: “into every teaspoon,” she writes,
is mixed the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the death of our place on earth. This is the sweetness that pricks people’s senses and sparkles in a birthday cake and glitters on the tongue. Price guaranteed, delicious, a craving strong as love.
America is too varied, divided and vast a country to produce a work that might now be called a “state of the nation” novel; it is a country of multiple nations, jostling for command of the narrative, in what is fast becoming a zero-sum game. With The Mighty Red, Erdrich offers us something more modest and more genuine: a portrait of one place that is as clear-eyed about the problems besetting its people as it is determined to envision a more hopeful future.
Patrick Flanery does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
