Since 1975, when she was honored for her poetry by the American Academy of Poets, Louise Erdrich has won every major U.S. literary prize: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Love Medicine (1984) and LaRose (2016), the National Book Award for The Round House (2012), the Pulitzer Prize for The Night Watchman (2020), and a slew of others. Her 19^th novel, The Mighty Red (Harper/HarperCollins, Oct. 1), has just been selected as a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize.

At the center of The Mighty Red is a teenage love triangle, smoldering with the particular intensity of adolescent romance. Gary Geist, son of the wealthiest family in a small town in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, is in love with Kismet Poe, daughter of parents struggling to stay above the poverty line. Her mother, Crystal, works the graveyard shift hauling beets for the Geist family’s sugar factory.

While Kismet can’t bring herself to ignore Gary’s desperate certainty about their connection, or his sudden marriage proposal, she’s long been crazy about Hugo Dumach, a boy genius who dropped out of school after being bullied in ninth grade. Since then, he’s built his own computer out of spare parts and worked at his mother’s bookstore, Bev’s Bookery. He plans to leave town, get a job in the oil fields, make his fortune, and return to claim Kismet as his bride.

The weave of the novel deftly incorporates many characters and subplots. The central love triangle is embedded in longstanding relationships among the three families, and each of the three mothers—Crystal Poe, Winnie Geist, and Bev Dumach—has a profound connection to her child. The three see each other at book club meetings sponsored by Bev’s store, which is currently reading Eat, Pray, Love—at Hugo’s suggestion.

And there’s more, from the adventures of a bank robber named the Cutie Pie Bandit to the grief and anger surrounding a recent tragedy involving Gary and his high school friends, whose details are withheld until the end of the book. As our reviewer put it in a starred review: “In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.”

Erdrich answered our questions over email; the exchange has been edited for length and clarity.

What was the original inspiration for The Mighty Red?

I was originally going to write about the 2011 lockout when union members working at Crystal Sugar, also in the Red River Valley, went on strike. It was a brutal, hard-fought situation that didn’t end for almost three years. The original title was Crystal. Later on, I shifted the focus of the bookand set it in 2008. Crystal was still the title until the last few drafts.

The strike is not even in the book anymore, Crystal is the name of one of the main characters, and the title is The Mighty Red! That’s the creative process for you, I guess. The first scene of the book seems to introduce every plotline and theme that’s to come. I reread it several times, marveling. Did you actually write that scene first?

I wrote the opening chapter when I was desperate for the book to come together. Quite late in the writing, I realized that the book wandered. I needed a magnetic charge to bring the plot together. So I went through the manuscript to find who had the magnetism and gave Crystal the hauling job.Then, as I wrote about Crystal, I saw my handwritten note that Gary had a guardian angel. So I put in a call-in show where Gary’s mother phones in to talk about guardian angels, and that ended up setting up the rest of the story.

One of the themes in the book is the importance of taking responsibility for the harm one has done as a first step to any kind of healing. So many characters have this issue in play; some make progress and some don’t.

It’s always a struggle to admit culpability, especially for a tragedy you might have prevented. But you’ll be dragged down the road by your guilty leg tied to the bumper of your sin anyway, so you might as well give up. If you do your best to help the wronged person—even though you believe you didn’t cause the wrong—you’ll feel mysteriously better. If it turns out you really weren’t to blame, you’ll have the gratification of a noble act. If you really were to blame after all, you’ve saved yourself the road rash.

This is a book about time and money, anchored in the particular financial moment of 2008–2009. Why that time period?

There are a host of reasons I set the book in 2008–2009. It was a year of reckoning that came as a result of Ronald Reagan’s enthusiasm for deregulation back in the ’80s. He undid financial protections that had kept our markets stable since FDR’s time. Those protections would have disallowed shady and risky mortgage investments by leaders of financial institutions. The $150 billion cleanup that saved our banks seemed unfair to those who lost their homes and savings, which is why I wrote a bank robber into the book.

Gardening is important to several of the characters. Are you a gardener?

I don’t know if what I do is gardening. I planted a clover lawn for rabbits so they wouldn’t eat my herbs. But I also planted the clover so I could watch rabbits pop above the clover when they binky [Ed.: A binky is a rabbit happy dance]. I planted a few tomatoes and some Hidatsa squash. Apparently, bumblebees wait out rainstorms in the squash blossoms.

The flash forward at the end of the book is so satisfying, it feels like a gift to the reader. Do you have some thoughts about what you like and don’t like as far as endings go? 

Yes, I gave the book a series of endings because I do like endings so much. Endings, beginnings, titles, and research—these are my favorites. I researched everything in the book and, as with every book, I have a whole other book of background on each character and on the facts of farming. It would be overwhelming to include it all, but my hope is that the reader senses the unsaid, the held-back, the historical lightness or weight in the details.

I love best those times when you don’t want a book to end. You’ve willingly surrendered yourself to the narrative, you’re under the spell of the book, and now it is going to be over. So you read as slowly as you can, putting down the book to make it last, but still you cannot lose the thread, so you pick it up. Then all of a sudden you rush to the end because you need it to end. You understand you can no longer live in that alternate world.

The endings I don’t like are the ones that go on and on analyzing the characters, as though a psychoanalyst is breaking a professional boundary and giving you a cascade of therapeutic resolution. Often a writer loses confidence in the characters to hold the ending and begins to philosophize on, say, art or trauma, not trusting that silence will say more. Not giving the reader just enough special blankness to use any way they wish. This is why, if I am not satisfied with an ending, I return to the manuscript and cut back to the place where it says more to say nothing.

Marion Winik hosts the NPR podcast The Weekly Reader.