By Scott Graber
It is Wednesday, wet, overcast but pleasantly cool. This morning I have my coffee and a sense of expectation.
My sense of expectation, actually excitement, comes from a book titled “The Mighty Red,” published by Louise Erdrich in September 2024. I started this novel a week ago and, in the beginning, it was slow going.
The novel is centered in North Dakota — an area of the country that I do not know. It involves farmers who raise sugar beets — an enterprise of which I have no knowledge. And the principal character, Kismet, is a teenager.
Generally speaking, I find teenagers awkward, ill-formed, few worth close examination. I remember my own teenage years — my own deficiencies — and I wince at the thought of the person I presented in those unhappy days.
Kismet comes from a family that lives on the margins — a mother (Crystal) who hauls sugar beets to a plant that then reduces them to sugar; a father (Martin) who is often absent and who is initially portrayed as irresponsible.
I also had trouble putting a face on Kismet.
Normally. I like my novels set down in places that I know — Oxford, Umbria, Abidjan. I like an unassuming hero who is usually a man. I like it when that ordinary man is given a task involving a long journey and takes up that task reluctantly. My protagonist knows he is unsuited for this dangerous journey but a long dormant sense of duty compels him to rise up and rise out of his safe, predictable, slightly-boring life.
I found this fictional template when I was 17 in “Trustee From the Toolroom.”
Normally I would have abandoned Mighty Red early on thinking, “You know what. My time is too valuable to wander around the beet fields of North Dakota trying to understand the mind of a teenager.”
But for reasons I cannot explain, I hung on and eventually got to know Kismet, Crystal, Gary and many others who inhabit this bleak North Dakota landscape.
I use “bleak” intentionally.
This part of North Dakota is given over to the growing of sugar beets. According to the novel it is also given over to pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, weed killers and fertilizers. The farmers who do this cultivation absorb these chemicals and, apparently, exude that bug and weed-killing scent when making love to their wives.
According to the novel, these chemicals also destroy the soil. There is a scene in a bar when the farmers try to pour water into dirt they have taken from their fields. They discover that water does not penetrate their degraded dirt.
Into this semi-lethal landscape, we also get a football team — young men who are wandering warily into manhood — and a wedding wherein Kismet is seen leaving her own on-the-ropes family for a wealthier, beet-growing family. We also get a book club where the farm wives willingly discuss this bleakness, forgetting they have a book to review.
And somewhere — maybe 100 pages into the novel — I realized I was in the midst of a well-imagined, wonderfully-written saga that was in the same league as “Splendor In The Grass” and “Angle of Repose.” Furthermore, I realized that I cared about Kismet, Crystal and the rest of these God forsaken folks (and their teenaged children) who were, in every sense, making their own journeys.
And so my evening routine has been interrupted.
Most nights, my wife and I fix a meal; then we carry that microwaved meal up to a television in our bedroom. Here, with a ceiling fan pushing around marginally-cooled air, we begin searching Netflix, YouTube and Prime for a movie.
Every night I click my way through a line of algorithm-selected movies hoping to discover something meaningful. And almost every night I am disappointed by the sameness of the plot, the sameness of the people who inhabit the formulaic movies that neatly remove a couple of hours from our allotted number.
But I’m here to tell you there is a better way to spend those hours if you read.
Of course you must work your way through the first 100 pages when the author is “clearing her throat.” You must engage your imagination picturing these damaged folk surrounded by great piles of beets and an odor that overwhelms the most liberal application of Paco Rabanne. You must slip away from your current reality and willingly journey into a foreign landscape.
Sometimes, not always, you will be renewed.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
