Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Louise Erdrich (“The Night Watchman,” 2021) returns with a story close to her heart, “The Mighty Red.” Set in the author’s native North Dakota, the title refers to the river that serves as a metaphor for life in the Red River Valley.It also carries a secret central to the story’s plot.The slow reveal of that secret propels a good chunk of the novel, which tells the story of Kismet Poe, a teen girl caught in the middle of a love triangle featuring one of the town’s richest residents (he stands to inherit two lucrative sugar beet farms) and a homeschooled romantic who works at his mom’s bookstore.
By page 15, 18-year-old Gary Geist proposes to Kismet, who then tells her mother, “It could be, I think, that I love him.” Pages later we meet Hugo, who Kismet considers less mature, but who built his own computer and has a plan to make lots of money in the oil fields, buy a car and win Kismet’s eternal affection.Erdrich’s prose is lovely as she describes scenes like this one, while Kismet and Gary’s friend Eric watch birds feeding on the prairie: “They outflew their shadows, veered so close and at such a rate of speed it seemed at every second they would collide, but only their shadows merged and came apart.Their intricate blur of flight rose to a frenzied joy so dark and dazzling that Kismet was lost in emotion.”Part of the story’s emotion comes from the contrast Erdrich establishes between a community that is economically tethered to a crop that is literally killing the earth and its inhabitants.
“Sugar is a useless and even harmful substance,” thinks Hugo in a moment of reverie, “and although this nutritionless white killer is depleting the earth’s finest cropland, you forget that when you are eating blueberry crumble.”There’s a secondary plot that Erdrich spins involving Kismet’s mom, Crystal, and her husband, Martin, who works as a traveling theater arts teacher throughout North Dakota.He ...