Tag: North Dakota

Review 2740: The Mighty Red

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Louise Erdrich has written some fantastic books but also some that I didn’t like as well. Still, she is usually a good choice for something thoughtful and insightful. However, with this novel I had to have patience for the first hundred pages as it centered on a teenage love triangle, something I had zero interest in.

It’s 2008. Kismet Poe is an eighteen-year-old part-Ojibwe girl living in a farming community in North Dakota in the valley of the Red River of the North. Her mother, Crystal, is hard working and frugal, and Kismet is working as a waiter in a restaurant. Both of them are careful with money to make up for the extravagance of Martin, Kismet’s father, who brings in little money working in theater and spends most of it on expensive clothing and extravagances.

During the last year, Gary Geist, the son of Crystal’s well-off boss, has changed from making fun of Kismet to deciding he’s in love with her. They are sort of dating. Even though he was a big high-school football player and extremely popular and she was considered a geek, he’s decided he has to marry her. I found this courtship, in which he continually tries to wear her down, so wrong, especially because Gary bores Kismet.

In fact, Kismet prefers and is having sex with Hugo, whom she finds soft and comforting. But Hugo is just a kid at 16. Gary has his reasons for wanting to marry Kismet, and his mother Winnie does, too, and he finally manages to wear her down enough to sort of say yes. Then, as Winnie takes over the wedding completely, Kismet can’t find a way to get out of it.

Crystal knows she shouldn’t let Kismet marry Gary, but she’s having her own issues besides being totally exhausted. Martin has been handling the church renovation fund and doing well. But in 2008 there’s the huge downturn and the church fund starts losing money. Then Martin disappears, and Crystal learns that her house—her own house, which has been paid off—now has a mortgage fraudulently obtained and the church fund is gone.

Surrounding all of what’s going on is something that is not being discussed but has to do with an accident the year before, in which two of Gary’s posse were killed.

The book got more interesting after the wedding, but I never really was that involved with the characters. And frankly, I didn’t like either of Kismet’s love interests that much. I liked Gary’s friend Eric, who also cares about Kismet, a lot better.

The novel has themes about the treatment of the environment and the damage modern farming techniques have done to the soil. Hugo goes to work for oil frackers at one point and sees the countryside being turned into a moonscape.

I think maybe there was too much going on in this book, too many characters, too many themes, too many directions, to have it really grab me. And some of the revelations that come out at the very end of the book would have involved me more if I’d learned about them earlier.

Related Posts

The Round House

The Sentence

The Night Watchman

Review 1592: The Night Watchman

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

There is always something that keeps my attention in Louise Erdrich’s books, although often they are very sad. In 1953, the United States Congress announced a program of “emancipation” of more than 100 First Nations tribes that was expressed as a program to put indigenous people on an equal footing with other Americans but was actually a way to yet again abrogate treaties and take land. Louise Erdrich’s grandfather helped save the Turtle Mountain Chippewa from this fate all while working full-time as a night watchman. The Night Watchman is Erdrich’s novel about this event.

Thomas Wazhashk, a member of the tribal council, receives a copy of the bill and figures out its intent from its bland, bureaucratic language. He gets the council to collect signatures on a petition and begins collecting information to support the tribe’s stance that its members are too poor to care for themselves so local authorities will have to take on the burden if the federal government doesn’t, this obviously a ploy to get support from state and local authorities to oppose the bill. While he works, he is visited by an owl and the ghost of an old friend who died as a boy after being imprisoned in the basement of a state boarding school.

As usual with Erdrich, aside from the main plot, the novel is full of interesting characters and subplots. Pixie Paranteau takes time off from work to try to find her sister Vera, who has vanished in Minneapolis after leaving to marry her boyfriend. On the train, she encounters Wood Mountain, a young boxer on his way to a fight, but when the fight is cancelled, he decides to make sure Pixie is all right.

Millie Cloud is the woman whom Thomas asks to share the results of the survey on the living conditions of the tribe that she wrote for her doctoral dissertation. She is socially awkward and dresses in geometric patterns.

This novels felt more hopeful than some of Erdrich’s even though it also contained scenes of brutality. My attention was engrossed by it.

Related Posts

LaRose

The Round House

There There

Day 1190: LaRose

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for LaRoseSet in 1999 on a North Dakota reservation, LaRose is about how a community, but in particular two families, are affected by a horrible accident. Out hunting a deer on his property, Landreaux Iron kills Dusty, the young son of his best friend, Peter Ravich, when Dusty falls out of a tree as Landreaux takes his shot.

To try to make amends, Landreaux, who has turned to the old ways to throw off addiction and straighten out his life, offers the Ravich family his own young son, LaRose, to raise. Nola Ravich, Dusty’s mother, is eaten up with hatred against the Irons, even Emmaline, who is her half sister. But having LaRose helps. Emmaline, however, can’t be expected to give up her son forever.

LaRose is the latest in a long line of LaRoses, all of whom had a special connection with the spirit world. LaRose finds himself able to help Nola and her neglected daughter, Maggie, even though he is only a small boy.

Another significant character is Romeo, who long ago was Landreaux’s best friend. He bears Landreaux a grudge because of an incident years before. Slowly, he works at his resentment despite the Irons having taken in his son Julius to raise.

Although I occasionally got distracted by how diffuse the plot is and how many directions it goes, in the main I enjoyed this novel. It isn’t nearly as depressing as a lot of Erdrich’s work, and it paints a powerful portrait of these two families. Dealing with forgiveness, of oneself and others, grief, guilt, and other human complexities, it is a strong novel.

Related Posts

The Round House

Shadow Tag

The Hour I First Believed

Day 810: The Round House

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Cover for The Round HouseThe Round House looks back to 1988, to traumatic events in the life of 13-year-old Joe Coutts and his family. Joe has had a comfortable life for a kid living on the reservation. His father is a tribal judge, and his mother is a social worker. They live in a homey, not fancy house, and his mother keeps a beautiful flower and vegetable garden.

Joe is enjoying the summer as any 13-year-old might, sometimes running around with his friends, sometimes helping out at home. One Sunday he is digging out saplings that have worked their way into the foundation of their house. His mother has run out to the office to pick up a file. She is usually very punctual, but he and his father realize she has not returned at her usual time. The two decide to go get her.

They pass her coming home, but it is not until they arrive home that they discover something horrible has happened. Joe’s mother has been raped and brutally beaten. They rush her to the hospital.

When the police come, she will not talk about what happened except for the broadest outlines. She was kidnapped from the old ceremonial Round House and taken somewhere else to be assaulted. She escaped after her attacker doused her with gasoline and went for matches. After she returns from the hospital, she retreats to her room.

Because of complicated laws related to who has jurisdiction over what type of crimes and where they are committed, Joe’s father begins trying to sort out how a prosecution could be pursued when they find the rapist. This task is made more difficult by the insistence of Joe’s mother that she doesn’t know where she was when she was raped. Joe himself starts looking for evidence of who could have committed the crime.

Like most of Erdrich’s novels set on the reservation, this novel is as much about heartbreaking experiences as anything else. Erdrich points out in the Afterword that up to 1/3 of Native American women are raped on the reservation, mostly by men who are not Native American. She says that this number is almost certainly an understatement, because Native American women don’t want to report rape. Many of these incidents cannot be prosecuted because of jurisdictional problems.

There were a few things that bothered me about this story, particularly that Joe doesn’t connect some money he finds near the scene of the crime with the crime or that he and his friends drink some beer they find even though they think it is connected with the crime and could be a clue. Even at 13 and in 1988, they had to have watched more crime shows than that.

In general, though, this is compelling reading, about the change in Joe’s family, about how fast he is forced to grow up, about the limitations of justice on the reservation.

Related Posts

Shadow Tag

Once Upon a River

Swamplandia!