Erdrich’s story fresh, funny despite dystopian premise
The jacket copy of Louise Erdrich’s salient new page-turner, “Future Home of the Living God,” calls her “a writer of startling originality.” Considering her prolific output, that assessment seems, if anything, an understatement. Her work has received multiple prestigious prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for both her 1984 debut, “Love Medicine,” and her 2016 novel, “LaRose,” as well as the National Book Award for her 2012 novel, “The Round House.”
And yet the premise for this latest novel sounds startlingly unoriginal. Its dystopian foundation builds upon well-trod post-apocalyptic material: A mysterious biological catastrophe wreaks fear and privation and leads the authoritarian government to make pregnancy and reproduction matters of state control, with predictably restrictive and unfortunate consequences for women, their fetuses and society at large.
Variations on such concepts have been deployed in countless works of speculative fiction ranging from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” to Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s 2002 comic book series, “Y: The Last Man,” to the 2006 film “Children of Men,” to name but a few.
But as another far-fromoriginal phrase points out, there is nothing new under the sun. So perhaps originality isn’t what readers should be looking for from this story. With its themes of evangelical fanaticism, racism and patriarchy, it gains resonance in being released during the Trump regime, which has cut off global health funding to organizations that offer or merely mention abortion.
Besides, in genre fiction in particular, the success or failure of a book hinges less upon the opening tropes and more upon how the author carries them out. Erdrich establishes her surprising and surprisingly funny book’s specifics in lucid language and gripping scenes. Drawing on her own base of knowledge as a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, she creates a determined, honest and flawed protagonist, Cedar Hawk Songmaker, a Catholic convert who is pregnant at 26 and due on Christmas with a fetus that appears normal in spite of the backward evolution that threatens human life.
Born to an Ojibwe mother but adopted by a progressive, privileged white couple in the Twin Cities, Cedar has a loving but complicated relationship with her adoptive parents. She has a great deal of anger for her biological mother, but it’s tempered by a newfound desire to connect with her. Erdrich endows Cedar with a bemused eye and an “overstriving brain,” rendering her observations a delight: her Native American bio mom — Mary Potts who goes by “Sweetie” — has “got a perfect heartshaped butt”; Mary’s husband’s “emotions jump too fast for perfect mental health”; and her scary-cute 16-year-old sister, Little Mary, who dresses in a self-described Goth-Lolita style, is “sort of a nightmare kitten.”
Among the book’s many strengths are its urgency and suspense, as well as the immediacy of its voice. The novel is written in the form of a journal that Cedar has begun to keep for her unborn child as she goes about her quest for understanding and survival, trying to avoid the far-reaching “gravid female detention” authorized by Congress under an expansion of the Patriot Act.
Even as the plot rounds all of the potentially doneto-death dystopian bases — end-times hoarding, the government seizure of media outlets, vast ecological devastation, a scrappy band of resisters — Erdrich’s sense of humor manages to make the darkness fresh and plausible.
The story of the oppression of women — especially minority women — is as old as time. No matter how frequently writers like Erdrich warn against such inequality, paternalistic leaders and laws continue to perpetuate race- and gender-based subjugation. Erdrich applies her stinging perspective to remind readers how much has happened, how much keeps happening and how far humans have yet to go.
Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.”