The Mighty Red: A Novel
“the way Erdrich drip-drip-drips the hints into the narrative gives them a quality of foreboding that punches above their weight.”
Set in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, The Mighty Red follows the interactions of several families and individuals as they struggle with relationships, work, tragedy, larceny, and the inherent chaos of life.
The family at the center of the story is led by wife and mother Crystal, a descendant of the Métis. “Their people had skirmished back and forth over this territory with the Dakota, and then truced just in time to have it stolen. Like the mighty red, history was a flood.” Other families are engaged in agriculture. “There were big-time owners and there were workers. It had been like that since the Red River Valley was settled. First the land was taken from the Dakota, the Ojibwe, the Métis, by forced treaties. Then the original people started working on the land they once owned.” Crystal pays the bills—at least most of them—working nights driving trucks ferrying sugar beets from field and storage to sugar factory.
The main character of the story is Crystal’s daughter Kismet, just graduated from high school. “Not one of the class beauties, exactly, but there was something about her that jumped off the page. A bit of force, some extra life,” the author writes. Two contemporaries vie for her affection, the class’s star athlete Gary; and Hugo, something of a nerd. Gary wins the day—not because Kismet prefers him, but because she feels he needs her—and there is an almost forced, too-soon wedding.
Dreading the approach of nuptials, Kismet, while partying with friends on a river bridge, jumps. She is rescued, and claims it was an accident. But her mother isn’t buying it. “Nobody lets themselves fall in the river, not this time of year, not ever. It was the region’s life giver, but also it was a treacherous brown vein of trifluralin, atrazine, polychlorinated biphenyls, VOCs, and mercury, not to mention uprooted trees and sunken cars.” Still, she cannot convince her daughter to call off the wedding.
The source of Gary’s need, to which Kismet succumbs, haunts the boy and has settled like a haze of trouble over other characters as well. But the cause is a mystery that flows through the book like an undercurrent, bubbling up now and then with little hints the author cleverly drips into the story. It has driven Gary’s mother, Winnie, into depression and near insanity: “But when Gary had nearly died and Travis and Jordan . . . well, when they died, some part of her had plunged down that pasture that once belonged to her farm and she’d gone into the river with those boys.”
Moving with Gary onto the family farm, Kismet sees evidence of her decline: “I’m cleaning Winnie’s house that hasn’t really been cleaned since before the accident,” which happened—whatever happened—more than a year ago.
Gary’s father, Diz, is also haunted: “When he let down his guard, he’d relive the little of what he knew had happened, in every detail, over and over. And always it seemed to Diz like something more happened—even more than what did happen. Or what he was told happened. More than the police report. More than the boys were saying. Unspoken matters.”
Eric, Gary’s best friend, was also involved in the accident: “He tried not to stumble into the dark space in his thoughts. But of course he was already there.”
One may get the impression from these quotations that this foreshadowing is frequent. It is not, at least in terms of the number of words the author gives it. But the way Erdrich drip-drip-drips the hints into the narrative gives them a quality of foreboding that punches above their weight. Other stories—the relationship between Kismet and Hugo, embezzlement and larceny by Kismet’s father, the danger to the environment from industrial agriculture—wend their way through the book. In the end, the author uses her skill with story to create a confluence in which the characters answer the big questions, or at least come to terms with them. As Kismet realizes to end the book, “This is the world.”