Book Review :: The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

Review by Kevin Brown

Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Mighty Red, appears to be about a young woman, Kismet, who is in love with Hugo, but marries Gary Geist, who seems to be protected by a guardian angel (or perhaps by his privilege), while also following Kismet’s mother, Crystal, who works driving a truck hauling sugar beets to the plant. There’s also a subplot about Crystal’s husband (though they’re not really married), Martin, who made poor investments for the local Catholic church’s renovation fund, losing everything in the 2008 recession (or embezzling it).

The novel is about those people and the area in North Dakota where they live, and their stories are interesting enough on their own to keep the reader engaged, wondering why Kismet would make the decisions she makes, how Crystal will cope with Martin’s disappearance (and the FBI’s investigation into that disappearance), and what secret Gary is hiding from Kismet.

It’s what characters don’t know or willfully ignore that truly matters, though, as Erdrich shows the effects humanity has on the planet, as well as on each other. Gary’s family signed a contract to raise only genetically-modified sugar beets, ones that will withstand the weedkiller RoundUp, refusing to see the effects that deal will have on their land and themselves. Americans willfully overlook the bailout of the banks, while people lose their houses, as well as church renovation funds. The country has always overlooked the way they treated Indigenous people, taking their land as well as their lives, leaving them with little of either, well into the twenty-first century.

Erdrich uses the sugar beets—and sugar, in general—as a metaphor for what we do to the planet and to each other. What the characters believe will be sweet in the short-term has long-term consequences, while the difficult decisions are the ones that lead to meaningful relationships. And all the while, the Red River runs through their lives, unchanging, ever-flowing, always changing.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich. HarperCollins, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite