On Oct. 1, the University’s very own alumna Louise Erdrich published her latest novel The Mighty Red, an idiosyncratic story following the teenage, gothic intellectual Kismet Poe. Throughout the narrative, Poe survives her tragic newlywed life in her small, sugar-beet-farming town in North Dakota, backdropped by the 2008 financial crisis.
What first won me over about The Mighty Red was its eccentricity. After hearing a description like the one I just gave, I will never have to ask myself: Which book was that again? But what convinced me of its status as a masterwork of storytelling was the variety of equally quirky themes it contains. It’s almost as if the reader can play a choose-your-own-adventure with the myriad themes: To explore the horrors capitalism has wreaked on the environment, turn to page ___. To investigate the intricacies and unspeakable depths of parent-child relationships, turn to page ___.
The novel has been criticized for encompassing too much. Some believe that the abundance of themes, the bountiful side plots and the well-populated cast of characters leave the reader pulled too thin in too many directions. I disagree. Erdrich’s intent behind her craft runs as deep as the mighty red river she depicts in her story — she doesn’t include anything superfluously or without careful consideration.
Rather than being one of those novels that reads like a monomaniacal manifesto force-feeding the reader a single, overemphasized theme and leaving no room for nuance or subtlety, The Mighty Red is a sampler of various messages. The beauty of this multivalence is that there’s something for everyone, and no one is left unsatisfied, wanting more.
Erdrich doesn’t cast a wide net in her writing just to ensure every reader is happy by the end. She does it to accurately depict the interconnectedness natural to a small town like the one described in The Mighty Red. Everyone is watching; every day is Judgment Day. How can a love-thy-neighbor town honor its reputation when everyone is aware of one another’s dirty laundry?
The Mighty Red is also the site of a debate between religousness and spirituality. With deft foreshadowing, the novel introduces this conflict in the first few pages in the form of guardian angels and a mountain lion — the former representing the religious, the latter the spiritual.
Poe’s mother Crystal — a sugar beet trucker — is tuned in to a radio show hosting an expert on guardian angels. A call-in guest describes her son who has survived several abnormal incidents. She concludes her statement by querying if her son has a guardian angel, to which the expert responds in the affirmative. Poe’s mother recognizes the call-in guest as Winnie — the mother of Gary Geist. The Geist family owns the farm that employs Crystal, and Gary Geist is a jock who’s been the town’s controversy ever since he inadvertently led his friends to their deaths in a snowmobiling incident. He’s also the boy unrelentingly asking for Poe’s hand in marriage.
Crystal doesn’t appreciate Gary Geist’s pursuit of her daughter. Driving down a seemingly infinite stretch of road, Crystal sees a mountain lion interrupt the headlights of her truck. She wonders what the ominous omen of the mountain lion means — a signal her grandmother has died, or could it have to do with Poe... maybe Poe and Gary Geist?
Erdrich injects an anxious thought into Crystal’s mind. “[G]uardian angels only protect their special person,” Erdrich writes. “Getting close to someone whose angel was as powerful as Gary Geist’s was asking for trouble.”
Another instance of praiseworthy foreshadowing was the night of Poe’s wedding with Gary Geist. Since the beginning, Gary Geist had been unyieldingly pursuing Poe. He knew hardly anything about her when he bought the engagement ring, and despite her initial refusal, he persisted in trying until she said yes. Poe’s “yes” was a result of impure motivation: she recognized she might not love him, but her mother’s adamant disapproval coupled with Geist’s infatuation with her convinced Poe to settle the deed regardless.
The night of Poe and Gary Geist’s wedding, something goes awry — or at least not how they expected. They get a free cake from the caterer. He had baked three cakes for a funeral, but one of them went untouched. Seeing as it was one of his self-proclaimed finest cakes, he wanted to repurpose it for the wedding free of charge: a funeral cake for a wedding. Despite her effort not to, Poe thinks to herself, “This marriage will end in death.”
It’s minutia like this throughout The Mighty Red — the mountain lion, the funeral/wedding cake — that tugged at my heartstrings, keeping them taut like a thread tied between a loose tooth and a doorknob. I was mourning the death of Poe before she even died. I consumed every word leading to the end like it was a trail of breadcrumbs laid out for me by Erdrich.
My gaze became so hyper-focused and myopic as if I were staring at my feet while reading: Is this when, where, how Poe will die? When I found myself at the end, I embraced a happy realization: Poe wasn’t going to die.
It’s a tacit, widely acknowledged — or so I would guess — expectation since the beginning of the story that the book will end with Poe’s demise. The entire novel is written as if already mourning her loss, like a eulogy before the funeral; an epitaph before the tombstone. Erdrich does everything in her power to sustain this illusion except for the one thing that would make it true: killing off Poe.
After marrying Gary Geist, Poe becomes ensnared in the home he built for the two of them. Winnie Geist is aware of the tenuous condition of her son’s marriage and the connection between the two. To prevent their relationship from ending as swiftly as it began, Winnie does the only thing she can think to do: keep Poe busy around the house and prohibit her from driving the car into town, leaving her stranded away from her mother and all that was familiar.
By subverting the reader’s expectation of Poe’s death, Erdrich revitalizes the story and imbues it with a demand for reverence and appreciation that Poe did not die. Reading about Poe’s survival, her escape from Gary Geist and return to Crystal feels like escaping near death. By the end, every loose end is tied neatly and every wrong is righted.
The human experience is a head-on collision, or a mosaic collaboration, of multiple realities — all of which can be true at once. No life exemplifies this better than Poe’s. The final words of The Mighty Red speak to this: “[T]imes were pleasant but also desperate. This was the world.”
