“All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Thus begins Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It was first published in 1878, the year the Russian Empire ended the war against the Ottoman Empire, which caused international alarm over Russian expansionism and fueled domestic unrest.
Mighty Red, the new novel by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich, takes place at a moment with some eerie historical parallels. Several of her characters have read Anna Karenina, and her intensely political book, like Tolstoy’s work, has a unique and far-reaching look at unhappy families, infidelity, and agriculture in the imperial state. Painting on canvas.
At the heart of Erdrich’s novels is the centrality of family and the way that misfortune itself can be highly political.
Review: The Mighty Red – Louise Erdrich (Hachette)
Mighty Red is set in the sugar beet fields of the Red River Valley along North Dakota’s eastern border and the burgeoning oil fields of the state’s western frontier, each suffering its own form of misfortune. , a complex drama about intertwined families. .
This is a country where the native bison were hunted to near extinction by European settlers, and in our time “the soil has been chemically modified to grow beets, which are then processed into sugar.” Industrial factories were emerging for the As the poison takes hold, the characters gradually discover devastating changes. The strange consistency of the soil destroyed by chemicals, the mass disappearance of birds and insects, and the eerie “black field flame plumes” from oil drilling.
Misfortune reverberates throughout the community and becomes harmful. It’s unfortunate that Erdrich’s characters feel forced to hide, often to the detriment of themselves and those around them.
The drama of a lopsided wedding, hidden and reckless criminal activity, and the disappearance of funds to renovate a local Catholic church dominates the story. However, these elements are primarily hooks to draw the reader into the more serious and often melancholy poetic meditations that become evident later in the novel.
Mr. Erdrich’s larger concern is the series of intertwined issues that have transformed American life over the course of the book, from the 2008 financial crisis to the present. These include the long-term social and environmental impacts of an ever more aggressive extractive fuel economy.
The novel addresses corporatized and polluting agricultural practices driven by the legacy of the Reagan administration’s decision to “call in loans that farmers had to pay back for decades.” It also depicts an agribusiness industry that encourages the use of herbicides, pesticides, and genetically modified seeds at the expense of sustainability and environmental protection.
Alongside these issues, Erdrich points out the regressive attitudes toward gender roles in rural American communities dominated by the Catholic Church, and the insidious intertwining of race and class that creates profound inequalities of opportunity and power. I’m exploring what I’m creating.
Displacement, instability, and cultural capital
The river in the title is the “source of life for the region,” but it is also the site of fatal accidents and near misses. It’s a “dangerous brown vein of trifluralin, atrazine, polychlorinated biphenyls, VOCs, and mercury, not to mention uprooted trees and sunken cars.”
The Red River cuts through land “taken from the Dakota, Ojibwa, and Métis peoples by forced treaty.” The “former people” became employees on “the land they once owned.” Mr. Erdrich offers a grim vision in which not only the original owners but also the migrant farm workers will be forcibly evicted. Their homes were “burned down” by white landowners, and the land “smoothed with lasers to grow several more rows of crops.”
Hachette Australis.
One of Erdrich’s great contributions to modern literature was his creation of complex characters who came from the economic and social fringes of American life. In the hands of many other writers, such subject matter is too often a satire with monolithic politics, predictable attitudes to gender, and a tendency to slide into the brink of static self-destruction. It ends up being made into a painting. Typical working-class characters surrender their agency to resentment, anti-government paranoia, or nonsensical religiosity, or succumb to destructive cycles of drunkenness and violence.
Erdrich’s characters are nuanced (and false) that defy every assumption that continues to be made in media and literature about how farmers, truck drivers, and manual laborers live, speak, and live their lives. The surprising range of attitudes (for some readers) makes it all the more believable. think.
Among Erdrich’s most important achievements in Mighty Red are the roles of truck driver Crystal Frechette and Kismet Poe, a bookish ex-goth daughter of failed actor and traveling theater teacher Martin Poe. This includes the depiction of It is said that the family name was once Poesy. It became shorter over the decades, and the poem (like Edgar Allan Poe) came to symbolize the darkness of the story.
These three figures are “the people of Kameyama, who caught each other in the bow and arrow of the Red River, and stuck there like trash on the branches of a tree.” (Erdrich himself is a member of Chippewa’s Turtle Mountain Band.) Crystal transports sugar beets from Winnie and Diz Geist’s farm, but their son Gary, a high school jock, forces Kismet to marry her. In doing so, Kismet turns her back on dropping out and educates herself on Hugo, the bookstore owner’s son, who appears to be her true love.
Crystal and Kismet realize that their insecurities frame them as outliers within the broader culture. They wear “75 percent off clothes from Arco and Thrifty Life,” while wealthy locals shop in “Fargo and Minneapolis” and flaunt it. Crystal makes her bread from scratch “not because it’s artisanal, but because it’s cheap.”
Nevertheless, she and her daughter “came to some extent to know that they were real Americans: Americans who were rattled, scratched, and always in debt.” is. Despite the constant perception that “wealthy towns are considered normal,” Crystal continues to believe that she and her daughter will find a way to “rise” from their precarious situation. are.
The desire for upward mobility is, of course, an economic desire. But it is also an impulse to acquire more substantial cultural capital. These characters have at least some knowledge of Tolstoy, but also Chekhov, Flaubert, Proust, Brecht, and Joan Didion. Such knowledge is expressed as something completely organic to their personality, arising from their particular history, occupation, and experience. Hugo and his mother’s bookstore and book club are the main driving force in the area.
Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Erdrich makes a serious political point: high culture is not the preserve of coastal, middle- or upper-class, or white America. It has real democratic values and purpose. She seems to be suggesting that even “difficult” and “classical” works are accessible to everyone. All that is needed is for such books to be placed within the reach of these potential readers.
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary turned out to be a negative model. Kismet actively resists falling into the gender trap that Flaubert and Tolstoy set for their heroines. She escapes the fate of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina and lives a completely different kind of life. In other words, a life in which you grasp your own agency before it’s too late.
power of emotion
That Erdrich tackles serious world history and environmental issues without sounding like a novelty is a testament to her talent for balancing a kind of mesmerizing melodrama with a series of rhetorical interventions.
Despite legitimate concerns about masculinity, corporatization, and environmental disaster, Mighty Red is ultimately a hopeful book. We consider ordinary Americans to be fundamentally good people. When they take a wrong turn, they have the potential to change, redeem themselves, learn to do better, and learn to be more than they thought they were.
It is not meant to mask the real darkness that is abundantly sprinkled throughout the length of the novel until the horrors that haunt the group of protagonists are finally brought to light.
Later in the novel, when a book club meets to discuss Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel The Road, Erdrich reveals an important question about how she intends to position The Mighty Red. Provide clues. As if to suggest that McCarthy’s stiflingly masculine, morally Manichaean, reactionaryly moody novels were the opposite of what Erdrich was writing, Kismet is the most sustained provides analysis.
I don’t think this book is about the end of the world. It’s just a setup to show what happens between people in extreme situations. Lastly, it’s about comfort. A father goes to the ends of the earth for his son and dies satisfied. Actually, it’s a very sentimental book. And then there’s the book of brutal adventures (…) And then there’s the cannibal army.
The Mighty Red is not a sentimental book, but a book that understands the power of emotions. It’s not a brutal adventure book either, though its pages feature brutality and adventure. And if there is an army of cannibals, she writes, it will be under the guise of mass human self-destruction, especially in Erdrich’s framework of the sugar beet industry “by the teaspoonful.”
There’s a mixture of the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the death of our place on earth. It is the sweetness that stimulates one’s senses and sparkles on the tongue in a birthday cake. The price is guaranteed, it is delicious and the desire is as strong as love.
America is too diverse, too divided, and too vast a country to produce what we would now call “national situation” novels. It is a nation-state in which multiple nations compete for control of the narrative, and it is rapidly becoming a zero-sum game. With The Mighty Red, Erdrich offers us something more understated and more authentic. It is a portrait of a place determined to envision a more hopeful future, while at the same time seeing with clear eyes the problems plaguing its people.
