Book review: 'The Mighty Red' by Louise Erdrich

Populated by a handful of middle-aged couples, their conflicted offspring, and an assortment of Dickensian teachers and town officials, The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich, A&S '79 (MA), is an ode to both the fragility of romantic love and our natural world.

Maybe that's why the book club in which many of the story's strong women cross paths first reads the you-go-girl memoir Eat, Pray, Love and then the postapocalyptic novel The Road. As the selections suggest, the time is the late-aughts of the 21st- century. The setting is rural North Dakota's Red River Valley, not far from the Canadian border, an ag-centric environment awash in underwater farms and failing banks. At the narrative's center, Erdrich has placed a bewitching high school senior named Kismet with at least three troubled teenage boys eating out of her capable hands. One of them, Gary, is burdened by a tragic secret that everyone (but the reader) sorta knows about and a mom, Winnie, who believes her son must have a guardian angel.

Might Kismet be the personification of that divine spirit?

Deftly written, the novel is sprinkled with stop-you-in-your-tracks sentences ("the sky had that hot blue eloquence of summer") and chortleworthy passages, such as one in which Kismet receives yet another postcard from a beau. It's coded in three bland sentences that they've agreed will stand in for three hotter sentiments: simple enough to remember that Kismet has long since swallowed the translation. The idea "had sounded romantic when they thought it up," Erdrich writes. "Now she wished they'd added more phrases, even though she'd have had to eat a bigger piece of paper."

Love reveals itself throughout by other codes, too: via flushes and pet names, silent yearnings and easy acceptances. Delivered in short chapters and six distinctive parts— the first three introducing the town's characters and places, the remainder working through a teenage marriage, unraveled secrets, and reunited lovers—The Mighty Red is a moving read about a group of ordinary people. Like the native weeds that pop up so often in the book, they may be underappreciated, but they're resilient and worth saving.