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In the beginning was the word
-� John 1:1

The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. The Word manifests itself in every creature.
--Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)

A car passes me bearing the bumper sticker Come the Rapture Can I Have Your Car. Oh, good, not everybody’s getting ready to ascend. I love driving. Thinking while I shoot along. If it is true that every particle that I can see and not see, and all that is living and perhaps unloving too, is trimming its sails and coming about and heading back to port, what does that mean? Where are we bound? Is it any different in fact, from where we were going in the first place? Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep. We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking about anymore.

Cedar Hawk Songmaker, 26, is writing a journal to her unborn child, very much hoping there will be a world left in which he or she can read it. This is a real concern, as the world appears to be going haywire. Plants and creatures, including people, are not breeding true. Giving birth, itself, has become a dodgy proposition. And who knows what will emerge?

The story follows Cedar, who had been adopted as an infant by white liberal city folks, through connecting with her Native American biological mother’s family, attempting to see her pregnancy through to term, and attempting to maintain her safety and freedom in a world where danger and attempts at intrusive control dominate.


Louise Erdrich - image from The Daily Beast

In the beginning was the title. Caren Wilton, in a 2006 interview with Erdrich for a New Zealand site, Noted, reports Erdrich saying she started with a title taken from a sign she had seen in an empty field: The Future Home of the Living God. It was to be a diversion from the more historical novels she is known for. She had a somewhat different focus in this early vision of the book.

Actually, it's about the postal system, says Erdrich...Perhaps I look dubious, because she starts to laugh. "It really is, I'm not making that up. I love the intricacies of the postal system. In the book, the US postal system decides to leave the government, and they make a compact with the National Guard so that the mail continues to be delivered."

At some point she opted to write something else. Her next adult book was The Plague of Doves. She got a bit of a prod to return to this one in 2016. According to ,

Louise Erdrich, speaking at a HarperCollins dinner, recalled how Trump's win drove her to take another look at a novel she had set aside years earlier, "Future Home of the Living God." The book…tells of a society in which women's rights and democracy itself are endangered,

among other things. It is not clear how much of the book she had already written prior to this, and what changes she made to what she had already done.

Dystopian visions abound these days. It is impossible, in considering this novel, not to summon to mind The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s (and television’s) concerns about human fertility, risky science, a planet rebelling against the outrages of a waste-based society, and women being restored to a subservient place in the culture with extreme prejudice. Is the dramatic decline in fertility in both Atwood’s and Erdrich’s books nature objecting to what homo sapiens has done to its home world? Is it a specific natural reaction to scientific overreach, an experiment or project gone terribly wrong? Among other reasons, the meanderings here give voice to the notion that heightened intelligence is not a particularly good quality to have in a species looking to stick around for a long time. Maybe being the brightest bulb as a species means burning out the fastest.

Motherhood is an obvious stream here. Beginning with the opening epigraph (noted at the top of the review), from Hildegaard of Bingen, manifesting with a plethora of characters named Mary, and including an internet-based Big Brother sort named Mother. Cedar is connecting with her birth mother after 26 years of separation. Is Cedar more from her adoptive parents or more from Mary Potts, her bio-mom? There is a parallel theme that looks at God and religion. Cedar is a convert to Catholicism, in fact even reads nerd-level religious journals, and engages in an ongoing internal dialogue about the meaning of what she sees in the more universal sense. A Native American saint, (like Cedar, an [adoptee]…who converted to Catholicism as a teen) has been sighted.

Where do we come from and where are we going, as individuals, and as a species? The notion, noted in the largest of the review-opening quotes, persists throughout, and is indistinguishable from the meandering thoughts on God and the nature of existence

This is not a typical Louise Erdrich novel, at least not judging by her most recent work, anyway. The story-telling is much more linear. No major time jumps to speak of, and the action remains focused on Cedar’s experiences. Also, while she is fond of magical realism, this has a more science-fictiony sheath within which to consider existential questions than the magical realism historical work she usually favors. It is definitely fun, in a dark way, when extinct creatures again roam the earth as humanity is de-volving. Don’t think too hard about how those beasties might have come to be, how they might have been raised to adulthood. Devolution is happening. Don’t sweat the details.

Cedar is a mostly sympathetic character, so one can relate to her struggle, as one could to Atwood’s heroine. Enough of the details of this world make sense to keep us in the story. Things like Native Americans looking at an opportunity to reclaim ancient land, and religious extremists using their organizational skills to take over and institute an autocratic theocracy (a redundancy, and probably a Mike Pence wet dream) make sense, particularly given the 20th and 21st century experience of failing states across the world. The details of societal devolution are fascinating.

I had one gripe in particular, a character who I felt was given short shrift. A man, who had been helping many women escape the authorities, gives up some information under torture, as I expect most of us would, is then seen as an enemy instead of another victim, and is turned away. Hmmm. This is not comparable to her recent masterpiece-level novels, The Round House, LaRose, The Night Watchman, and The Sentence, but, overall, Future Home of the Living God a pretty good read. You can take my word for it.


Review first Posted � 12/1/2017

Published - 11/14/2017


=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s and pages. Erdrich's personal site redirects to the site Birchbark Books. She owns the store.

Other Louise Erdrich novels I have reviewed
-----2021 - The Sentence
-----2020 - The Night Watchman
-----2016 - LaRose
-----2010 - Shadow Tag
-----2012 - The Round House
-----2008 - The Plague of Doves
-----2005 - The Painted Drum

Interviews
-----Paris Review � Winter 2010 - by Lisa Halliday
-----Noted � April 2006 - Caren Wilton

Other
-----Alchetron - - a nice history of Erdrich and her work
----- Flowers for Socrates - November 2016 - - this blog entry intersperses poems by Erdrich with bits of her history. A snippet of one in particular caught my interest, given her fondness for the surreal, from Advice to Myself

Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.

-----December 28, 2018 - - a collection of articles that look at the nation-wide right-wing attack on abortion rights. Serious stuff, worth checking out