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ARC for review. Published October 1, 2024.

Review published in the Charleston Gazette Mail, Saturday-Sunday, October 19-20, 2024.

THE MIGHTY RED - Louise Erdrich, October 1, 2024, Harper, 384 pages.

Erdrich, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award sets her latest book in Argus, North Dakota, right at the onset of the economic downturn of 2008. Football hero Gary Geist is set to inherit two farms and is anxious to marry Kismet Poe, a former goth girl. He’s afraid, she’s impulsive.

Hugo also loves Kismet. A home-schooled boy, he’s determined to steal her from Gary. Hugo wants to leave town and make his way in the oil fields.

Kismet’s mother, Crystal, is a truck driver for Gary’s family, doing a continual loop each night. She sees guardian angels and is worried about the future. Kismet’s father, Martin, is a frustrated drama teacher and failed investor who has lost the local church’s savings.

Gary’s parents are Winnie, who is a bit of a monster because of some underlying trauma, and Diz, who was born to money. Hugo’s mother, Bev owns the local bookstore and she is married to Ichor.

Of course, something big happens that has the potential to change everything. There’s a book club in town that serves as a place for women to air things out.

Kismet is torn between Gary and Hugo. Each could fulfill different needs that she has. And both desperately want her. At one point Gary, who is not a reader, enters the bookstore. Hugo toys with the idea of Tasering Gary, but decides he cannot as he, as a book seller, “lived out a vow, almost mystical to help those who entered his domain find the book they needed.� And so Hugo does, even though he’s helping his arch-rival find a book to help his relationship with Kismet. And Hugo and Kismet never consider that if Kismet married Gary that would be any reason for them to stop seeing each other.

Argus is definitely feeling the effects of the financial crisis. Shopping at thrift stores, eating generic foods - these are a way of life for most citizens. Crystal tries hard to hide and save money, but Martin always seems to ferret it out and spends it on small luxuries for himself, like expensive coffee and high-priced shirts.

Perhaps Martin’s spending is his way of dealing with his issues, because the men of the Valley are stoic, “they didn’t generally talk about their feelings. They didn’t go deep into things. Their bond was work.�

The crop that gave the Geists their fortune, and what Crystal hauls each night, is sugar beets. But just like with the Red River Valley - “land…taken from the Dakota, the Ojibue, the Metis by forced treaties. The original people started working on the land they once owned.� - the sugar beets have a dark history, “every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup of pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of the buffalo.�

“The Mighty Red� is a wide, grand story about the land and what we, as people, have done to it through climate change, the use of pesticides in farming and the ways we use our natural resources. Of course, it’s also about marriage and live - all kinds of love, how we take love and how we offer it to one another.