Flexes through an emotional range that most writers would never dare attempt ... Humor and sorrow are fused together like twined tree trunks that keep each other standing ... Erdrich is so good at romantic comedy, with her special blend of Austen sense and Ojibwe sensibility. As the funny scenes flow one after another, you may not even notice the stray drops of blood scattered along the novel’s margins ... As usual when closing a book by Louise Erdrich, I’m left wondering, how can a novel be so funny and so moving? How can life?
The book is deliciously strange, entirely captivating, another outright triumph. Daffiness mingles with brutality, high comedy with wrenching tragedy, in a saga involving a close-knit yet deeply divided farming community ... By turns heartrending and hilarious, righteously angry and expansively numinous ... One of Erdrich’s most warm, droll, and hopeful novels.
Enthralling ... Erdrich is at her best — as she is here — when she draws on her deep connection with the Great Plains and its Indigenous people ... In The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich’s enthralling ode and elegy to the people of North Dakota’s Red River Valley, climate change, Big Ag and economic hard times have ravaged the landscape in and around the small town of Tabor during the late aughts. Many of its inhabitants are descendants of the Ojibwe, Dakota and Métis tribes, whose acreage was lost to them in a series of cession treaties over the centuries; they now scramble to make a living, toiling for others on land that was once theirs ... This backdrop could make for a mournful tale of intergenerational trauma and displacement, but Erdrich has other plans for her characters, whom she imbues with the grit and optimism to rise above their challenging circumstances ... There is an amiable, inviting quality to all of Erdrich’s 19 novels that in part explains how it is possible to be hugely entertained while learning why farmers require increasingly powerful pesticides or what our collective sweet tooth is costing the planet. That accessibility, though, in no way diminishes Erdrich’s unparalleled ability to conjure a scene or a character, or to portray the natural world with awe.
For most of the novel, the details are murky and are more powerful for remaining so. When the tragic night is ultimately revealed in all its awful inevitability, Erdrich does so with a deep well of compassion for everyone involved ... Erdrich depicts time passing fast and slow, backlighting the rush of current events with the immense, slow turning of the earth ... At once a tender coming-of-age story and a wise tale of older love. The ever-afters here are scarred but hopeful, born of difficult choices and mercy for what can’t be undone.
It’s all quite stagey, with interwoven storylines that dwell on adolescent romance, repressed traumas and far-fetched redemptions. Too often the histrionics seep into the writing ... But what persists in Ms. Erdrich’s work is a spaciousness of vision that reduces the melodrama of plot to a secondary concern ... Another poignant novel of place.
A novel of the collective ... These interludes bind the work together, transforming an immersive domestic drama into one that, like much of Erdrich’s oeuvre, speaks to the acrimony at the heart of the American national project.
This is Erdrich’s nineteenth novel, written with her world-building muscles fully flexed ... When Erdrich is at her best, her characters rise to meet the grandeur of their environment. If The Mighty Red should be classed among her less successful novels, it is because the people and their situations feel flimsy and improvised in comparison to their robustly constructed world ... Around this love triangle orbits a wide array of characters, and the novel sometimes seems designed by free association as Erdrich picks up a thread and pursues it away from the main action ... Louise Erdrich has to stretch scenes past credulity.
Examines how people can simply give up when their futures appear to be defined by poverty or tedium. Erdrich waits to reveal the details of the incident that precedes the novel’s opening but, when the facts are revealed, they’re distressing. With the scent of rotting beets overpowering every chapter, there’s a timeless quality to this farmland novel.
Arguably, there’s a bit too much going on here, and the reader isn’t given much help to discern what really matters, or indeed what we might need to dwell on, as the book sprints toward its rather skittish and unsatisfying denouement. Some pivotal scenes are so protracted and overblown that the tension slackens, while the crowded design and lurching plotting doesn’t allow for sufficiently engaging character growth to pull the reader through ... But the narrative voice is the redeeming quality. It takes a while for the reader to settle into storytelling as tonally mixed as Kismet’s quilt, but Erdrich’s achievement is pretty remarkable: a voice with brio and lightness that wends and weaves, as the titular river does, between modes and moods.
With irresistible characters, dramatic predicaments, crisp wit, gorgeously rendered settings, striking ecological facts, and a cosmic dimension, Erdrich’s latest tale of the plains reverberates with arresting revelations.
