Review: Louise Erdrich’s latest, ‘The Mighty Red,’ ranks among her very best

Louise Erdrich’s 19th work of fiction — “The Mighty Red,” named for the river that shapes the North Dakota valley where the book is set — opens with a five-page scene titled “The Night Driver, 2008.”

While her husband and daughter are home sleeping, Crystal Poe works overnight at the sugar beet facility owned by the richest family in town, the Geists. In an image that recalls the movie “Nomadland,” she pulls up to a giant pile of beets that she’ll load for transfer to the sugar plant. She’s listening to a talk radio show about angels.

Who should call in but Winnie Geist, going on about her son Gary? Gary has survived many near-death experiences, including a recent party involving snowmobiles where “things happened” but he emerged “more or less okay.” What she wants to know is: Does he have a guardian angel? Crystal is in a book club with Winnie Geist. In fact, she can see the light in Winnie’s bedroom window right now. She doesn’t much like Gary Geist, who used to tease her daughter.

Also in this brief scene, Crystal spots a mountain lion.

Erdrich, who will discuss the book with MPR’s Kerri Miller at the next Talking Volumes, has just laid out everything in it like a perfect dining table. On one level, this is a story about the Geists and the Poes, located at the two ends of the class spectrum in their town, and as the story rolls from 2008 into 2009, things get tougher for everyone.

In the next scene, Gary will propose to Crystal’s daughter Kismet, and though she loves another boy — an oddball prodigy named Hugo — and they are all far too young, she can’t bring herself to say no. Maybe Gary’s guardian angel has gotten to her. This whomper-jawed “Romeo and Juliet” is half of the main storyline.

The snowmobile tragedy is the other half. As the short chapters rotate among the characters and their subplots (these are piled as high as the sugar beets, including embezzlement, armed robbery, identity theft, a fracking operation, fraying marriages, gardening and the attempts of the book club members to read “Eat Pray Love”), we gradually learn the details of what happened that night.

Through it all, the farming and processing of sugar beets rolls on, turning the soil to dust as the pesticides and herbicides do their silent evil. But Erdrich ends her tale with a slide show from the characters’ future, sending somebody to college to study biotechnology and weed science, showing somebody else a river sturgeon, “designed seventy-eight million years ago,” giving various sets of old lovers new hope. We don’t again see the mountain lion — but, like an extra fork on the table when the plates are cleared, it sticks in your mind.

“The Mighty Red” is as a good a novel as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Erdrich has written and, as most will agree, that’s saying a lot.

Baltimore-based writer and professor Marion Winik is the author of the memoir “First Comes Love.”

The Mighty Red

By: Louise Erdrich.

Publisher: Harper, 372 pages, $32.

Event: Talking Volumes, 7 p.m. Tue., Fitzgerald Theater, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul, $25-$32.50, mprevents.org.