How can a novelist keep writing so many good books so consistently for so long? Louise Erdrich came out of the gate strong with Love Medicine in 1984, but the last 12 years have seen a magnificent run of novels that racked up prizes galore. This fall brings another surefire winner: The Mighty Red (Harper/HarperCollins, Oct. 1), which Kirkus, in a starred review, calls “tender and capacious.” Erdrich answered some questions by email; the exchange has been edited for length and clarity.
What were you reading, listening to, or watching during the writing of The Mighty Red?
The book is set in 2008-09, so I was listening to Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, the Pussycat Dolls. Also Northern Cree. I was reading old newspapers and agriculture reports; The Road; Eat, Pray, Love; Far From the Madding Crowd; The Return of the Native; as much as I could bear on pesticides, herbicides, and groundwater depletion; also the geology of the Red River Valley, bird migration, trees, and storms. As I was finishing up a long, involved bout of editing, I was overjoyed to get an advance copy of Where Wolves Don’t Die by Anton Treuer, an Anishinaabe writer from Minnesota. This book took me far from the Red River Valley into Indigenous territory in Canada, on a life-and-death adventure with people who were warm, funny, competent, impulsive, mistaken, wise.
Where and when did you write the book?
I write in the attic of my house in an old chair I had reupholstered in a crimson-red plush material. I still have to write whenever I get the chance and don’t have a true routine. It feels exquisite when my life is calm and orderly, but then I become impatient and feel that I should be cleaning. About five years ago I began to realize that my carefully compiled scrapbooks and notebooks and diaries had become alarming. I was going to burn them but my sister said to keep them because you never know.
What was most challenging about writing this book? And most rewarding?
As I started The Mighty Red I thought it was going to be about a terrible process—industrial farming—but it became a book about a different terrible process—love—and another terrible process—making money—and yet another terrible process—work. Somewhere along the way all of these terrible processes got mixed up with ecstasy and beauty. Writing the beginning was easy and pleasurable; writing the end was easy and pleasurable; writing the middle was a terrible process.
What fall release are you most eager to get your hands on?
I look forward to rereading Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. At last I get to say how deeply, madly, irrecoverably, I loved Creation Lake. I got that eerie sensation from the first page—the feeling you have when you know you belong to this book. Not only was she writing my favorite sort of narrator (despicable) and about my least favorite sort of people (charismatic whiny men), but she was writing about my favorite subjects (deep time and betrayal) and it was all stylish and cool, and then somehow the book struck a blow to my heart, which surprised me a lot, because I did not suspect what Rachel Kushner was really up to all along.
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
