I’ve been a fan of Louise Erdrich for decades, and remember thinking that Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks were as fine a sequence of three novels as I had read. I hadn’t read much from her since then–perhaps a couple novels and a book of poetry. And then I saw something that mentioned Future Home of the Living God (2017), describing it as her entry into dystopian fiction.
Sign me up!
It does not disappoint: Erdrich creates a confident and sure-footed narrative, set in the near-future where an unexplained occurrence has led to evolution reversing its course (yes, there is an appearance by a sabre-toothed tiger, but that’s not really the point). The protagonist is young and pregnant–something so rare as to subject her to an immediate threat of state control–and the novel traces her struggles to remain free, while also discovering what she can about her own family history, encompassing her own Native American roots and adoption by a white American family, as well as her fairly sophisticated integration of Catholicism into her world.
The journey is both page-turning and emotionally compelling, and Erdrich’s creative insights into feminism, faith, and resistance are all made while steering the book well-clear of a simplistic allegory. It’s a solid book, recommended.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Publish as regularly and successfully as Erdrich? OK, aside from that, create a character with the complexity of the protagonist, who is in turns highly intellectual, naive about the workings of the world, reactionary in her reactions to her family, and carefully considered in how she should proceed: an excellent capturing of a young adult struggling to survive, having been thrown into a world far beyond her capabilities.