“The Mighty Red,” the title of Louise Erdrich’s rambunctious new novel, definitely refers to North Dakota’s Red River, around which much of it is set, and probably refers to a large, red-headed character named Hugo. It’s also the subject of Erdrich’s appearance Tuesday at Talking Volumes.
A central event in “Mighty Red” is the marriage of a young woman named Kismet, but will she end up with brash Gary or gentle Hugo? Most of the characters have something to say about that, including Kismet’s mom Crystal, a truck driver who hauls sugar beets and whom Erdrich — a Pulitzer Prize winner for “The Night Watchman,” National Book Award winner for “The Round House” and owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis — says is something of a stand-in for her.
Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa who lives in Minneapolis, has written 20 books. She will talk about them — as well as the most delicious walleye, staying hopeful and being “a known conversation killer” — at Talking Volumes, presented by the Minnesota Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio.
Q: What came first when you were dreaming up “The Mighty Red”?
A: The first character I really thought about was Hugo. He goes back about 10 years and just kept plodding back into my notebooks with his obsessions about geology and energy and with his hapless ardor. I guess a lot of this book is about hapless ardor. Here we are, wired to mate, yet relationships are so ridiculous and awkward and, if you are lucky, magical.
The goal in my books is never to get two people together and leave them marooned, but to explore the tension and idiocy in a relationship. I mean, love. When love gets to a critical madness, people get married to reduce the madness to manageable increments of madness — like who keeps track of the vacuum cleaner attachments? Who deals with the mice? Who mislabeled the electrical box? Forget nosegays and frothed milk. Dawn dish soap becomes the thing you can’t live without. Like Kismet, you may end up making three-egg breakfasts for your husband’s family and eating your own breakfast out in the garage.
Q: Like “The Sentence,” “The Mighty Red” is set in the recent past. Lots of “Sentence” readers were struck by your ability to evoke pandemic-era behaviors (like sanitizing the mail) that we engaged in, quit and then promptly forgot. Is it tricky to capture a past that most readers lived through?
A: You’re right. We forget the details of what we live through. This book is set in 2008-2009. The first hint I had of the mortgage crisis was running into someone I knew who was shaking and distraught over losing the house into which she’d sunk all she owned. It was devastating and it was happening everywhere.