A teenage love triangle set against North Dakota’s Red River Valley reveals humor, humanity, and sorrow in Louise Erdrich’s new novel, The Mighty Red.
Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians) continues to explore the everyday nuances and struggles of Ojibwe families in modern North Dakota with her latest novel, The Mighty Red. The coming-of-age story was published by HarperCollins Publishers and hit bookshelves on October 1, 2024, to immediate glowing reviews. The star of the show: the marriage between Erdrich’s quick humor and striking moments of sorrow.
The love triangle is set up as most typical love triangles are — a young woman catches the eye of two young men who vie for her affection. However, the poisoning of the land that North Dakota farmers have sewn their livelihood into, the clashing of classes, and the creeping doom of the 2008 Great Recession seep through the cracks of this story, bringing Erdrich’s signature surrealism and mysticism.
Kismet Poe is an 18-year-old former Goth girl who wrestles with the push-and-pull between her empathy for the men who want her and her desire to fly away as soon as she graduates. Gary Geist, a football player and son of wealthy farmers, has pushed for a marriage between he and Kismet for months, eventually wearing her down. Kismet’s mother, Crystal, who hauls sugar beets for Gary’s family, is suspicious of Gary’s seeming good luck in the face of several near-death experiences and worries about her daughter in the form of visions of guardian angels on her night walks.
Kismet has also caught the eye of Hugo, a bookish young man who helps his family run the local bookstore. Hugo consciously takes on the role of home wrecker, attempting to become closer to Kismet through literature. Both men are infatuated by Kismet but see her Indigenous identity as a “mysterious” facet of her being, forcing Kismet to reckon with the cultural differences she will have to navigate no matter who she chooses.
Often pulling from her own life, Erdrich discovered the name and spirit of her main character Kismet after her daughter rescued an injured bird. The bird lived with Erdrich’s daughter Pallas until it was well enough to make its way back home, a saga that was documented by Erdrich on Instagram. Indeed, the character of Kismet infuses The Mighty Red with the central fight between freedom and safety.
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The Mighty Red is set against the farming community of Argus, North Dakota, where fracking and climate change slowly deplete the resources of the soil. The Great Recession is putting everyone on edge, inflating the prices of everyday things — wedding dresses, loaves of bread, bags of peaches. Class and race relations between rich white farmers and working class Indigenous women are put on display during the fraught wedding between Kismet and Gary that ultimately explodes into converging narratives. As plunging as the novel is, Erdrich still manages to chisel out moments of humor and teenage angst that have the reader chuckling in spite of themselves and loving these characters no matter how hard they try not to.
A native of Little Falls, Minnesota, Louise Erdrich has written over 28 books, many of which follow the lives of Ojibwe families in North Dakota and Minnesota. She has won numerous awards for her books, including an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her 2009 novel The Plague of Doves, a National Book Award for Fiction for her 2012 book The Round House, and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 2021 book The Night Watchman. The Mighty Red is now a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, adding to her vast array of recognitions. She also owns Birchbark Books, a Minnesota book store that provides Indigenous stories to the community.
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