Repression in the present, future
It’s already snowing in Minnesota in mid-October. “We’ve got a snowstorm outside,” Louise Erdrich says by telephone, because the connection is poor. “It might be affecting the lines.”
Erdrich, the acclaimed novelist whose 2016 “LaRose” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, likes to maintain clear communication — which is why she prefers to conduct interviews via email. “This is the problem with phone interviews,” she says, a few minutes into an answer. “I start off on tangents.” But she’s articulate, warm and candid as she speaks about her latest book, “Future Home of the Living God” (Harper, $28.99), a complete departure from her previous work. This dystopian novel set in the near-future revolves around Cedar Hawk Songmaker, a young woman who is halfOjibwe by birth but who has been raised by an Anglo couple named Glen and Sera Songmaker.
Something dire has happened in the world, and it’s affecting all kinds of things, from the food supply to migration patterns to the very nature of human life. When Cedar discovers she’s pregnant, she knows that she has to be careful. When she has an ultrasound, the technician says, “We’ve got one.”
While Cedar tries to hide while in her first trimester, once her pregnancy starts to show, she has to flee — and, fortunately, she has now been introduced to her biological family up north and has somewhere to go. “I wanted to explore what a public creature you become when you’re pregnant, how everybody puts their hands on you, you’re vulnerable to an extreme degree when you’re pregnant.” Cedar’s flight and her adventures are, Erdrich acknowledges, an epic journey with an expectant mother at its center — and when was the last time you saw that?
Erdrich agrees that this novel is about “the other side of choice. I don’t know why this hasn’t been explored more deeply, but every time you make a choice to have a child, you give up all of these other options that are potential children in your life.”
The subject matter isn’t surprising for Erdrich, who has said that she couldn’t have been a writer “without birth control.” She has now published 16 novels, plus poetry, children’s books, short stories and a memoir. “When I was accepting the Library of Congress Prize I think I thanked Planned Parenthood first of all, because it’s true. If I hadn’t been able to choose when to have a baby, I would not have been able to put in those crucial years of growth as a writer, when you make so many mistakes and you go in every direction and you paw through the language and you need that freedom at that time.”
When asked if she wanted to explore the idea of the state controlling women no matter what they want, she answers quickly and firmly. “That’s why it’s so obvious to me that anti-choice rhetoric isn’t about religious faith. That’s just a way for people to frame what they’re doing in a way that is palatable for them. Anti-choice is about controlling women’s bodies period. It’s about seizing control of young women. That’s it. That’s what it’s about. Period.”
Erdrich also believes that older women with strong voices have a responsibility to those young women under siege. “We do have stronger voices, in large part because we were able to make our choices at that crucial age. Of course, coming of age when I did, when I talk about it, it astounds my daughters who range in age from 16 years old to 32 years old. We had the right to have abortion. It was simple, very simple. They cannot believe it. That there was that, because it’s so different now. It’s so different.”
One of Erdrich’s favorite female villains of fiction is Becky Sharp of Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” “because she’s taken the lessons of our culture and applied them in perfect order. She’s manipulated. She’s ambitious. She’s greedy. She wants power. It’s a short recipe for being a witch.” You can’t want those things out in the open, she says, if you’re a woman.
One of the most interesting aspects of “Future Home of the Living God” has to do with females who are revered, including the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the “first” (in 1656) Native American to be so recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. Cedar, who in spite of her bohemian adoptive parents’ objections has converted to Catholicism, looks to St. Kateri as a role model, along with other female saints like Hildegard of Bingen. But the outlines of sainthood are not exactly empowering to women, says Erdrich. “By any accounts they led horrifying lives. Kateri experienced a time in which nine out of 10 people around her were dead. Nine out of 10! She either probably thought, ‘Our ways haven’t helped us. I’m going to go and conform to this entirely other world.’ She was traumatized beyond trauma. She had to seek some sort of help.”
Erdrich still writes in longhand, in notebooks, and she still sells paper books at her Minneapolis store, Birchbark Books. It’s doing well, she says: “We’re kind of shocked, because we still can’t get it through our heads that we have survived.” In her life and her work, Louise Erdrich continues to pay attention to the future.