Sweet poison

A character named Poe. A ghost. Way too much sugar. Happy Halloween from Louise.

A character with the last name Poe.  Bones in a field.. Costumes, sugar. Lots of sugar. And a tragic ghost. If you too are a Halloween horror-averse lightweight, Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red makes a surprisingly appropriate seasonal read. 

On the surface, this is a love triangle story. High school senior Kismet Poe, daughter of Crystal Frechette who drives the night shift for a local sugar plant, feels a strong connection to a brilliant outcast named Hugo. But Gary Geist, quarterback of the football team and son of the owners of the biggest sugar beet farm in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, has become obsessed with marrying her.

Kismet is one of the smartest and most formidable girls at school, and also one of the poorest. She’s got college plans but Gary– and his mother–won’t take no for an answer. Kismet has reservations about Gary, but she can’t help but notice how her status has improved with his interest, despite his own problematic social dilemma. 

A party he hosted became the site of an accident resulting in the death of two of his teammates. His parents and others in town rightly suspect there’s more to the story of Gary’s role in what happened than he and his friends are telling. Now Gary behaves erratically and no one seems willing to address it. (Is this a Mid-Western thing?) But Gary knows something’s not right with him— a haunting is involved— and he has convinced himself and Kismet she’s the only one who can make it go away.

Add in Kismet’s obligatory teen rebellion and her father suddenly slinking out of town when some money goes missing. Now the whole town is looking askance at Crystal, and Kismet seals her fate.

The main character’s name is not the only hokey Erdrich touch. The book contains some comic scenes bordering on slapstick. As in The Sentence, which I wrote about earlier this year, one of the characters owns a charming bookstore. The scenes with the squabbling ladies’ book club she runs, and the addition of a character known as the Cutie Pie Bandit, provide some more Read with Jenna-worthy content.

If the book sounds a bit like Beartown, you’re on the right track. But also, mix in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and any other Erdrich you’ve read. The Mighty Red is set in a farming community during the 2008 financial crisis– with flashbacks through river time and human time in that river’s valley– to explore how use of land over that time and the past and current crises that land has seen are bound up with our future.

Specifically, The Mighty Red connects our voracious taste for sugar that was fueled in the U.S. originally by the sugar cane plantations of the 19th century and the slaughter of the buffalo. The enslavement of labor and the plentiful discarded bones that when charred made it possible to cheaply bleach large quantities of cane sugar white, allowing refineries to scale up to increase American’s demand for the stuff.  Now about half of our sugar comes from beets, driving the use of toxic pesticides and requiring heavy trucking, contributing to soil poverty, climate change, and a community health crisis. 

If you just want to eat ridiculous quantities of Halloween candy like every other year, The Mighty Red may not be the book for you. But if like

Taylor Lorenz

and me you’ve been trying to eliminate sugar from your diet (again), Erdrich might be able to help:

 So it was, every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup or baked in a pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of the buffalo.

Just as now, into every teaspoon, is mixed the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the death of our place on earth. This is the sweetness that pricks people’s senses and sparkles in a birthday cake and glitters on the tongue… a craving strong as love.”

While I don’t always love for the novels I read to be so directly instructive, I make exceptions. I’ve been reading Erdrich for so long my tolerance is high. And because these characters are so normal, aware at times but also conditioned by the ways they grew up and just trying to get by like we do, it doesn’t feel judgemental. The facts were interesting, while the “what happened that night?” suspense, the doomed romance plot, held just barely enough tension to keep my interest in the second half. Together, however, the familiar small town storylines, grounded in the unique, long unfolding history and geology of the place, worked on me. 

Since I finished the book, I’ve been holding onto a final image, both pleasant and desperate, of geese flying north, “toward the giant puddle at the top of the world.” The larger forces at work can feel so overwhelming but I believe our choices do matter, our fate is not sealed, and we can change.

Let’s hope so because…

The other book I’ve been reading is Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. I did not see “read dystopian fiction about the year 2024 while crunching maniacally on celery and rice cakes” suggested in this recent guide to de-stressing but actually I think it’s helping? It is a long way to Tuesday. In the meantime it’s reassuring to think anything I could fear has already been contained in this bleak book.

In case you missed it

• My month of climate-themed reading is coming to an end, but there are so many titles I learned about and am looking forward to coming back to eventually. I’ve added a recommendation from

  Kolina Cicero
  , The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World by Elizabeth Rush to my library request list.

• What percentage of people who buy books on Amazon actually use it to actually shop for books they might want to read? Or is Amazon really just a shipper for books people already know they want to buy? On the

  Book Riot
  podcast this week, Jeff O’Neal asked this and other book questions that cannot be answered. If you buy books online anywhere, I’d love to know whether you use your favorite site to shop or ship.

Thank you

To new paid subscriber, Pat. So glad to have you here. All paid subscriptions to this newsletter in 2024 will be donated to support freedom to read. So far we’ve already donated over $1,400 this year.

And Happy Halloween to all who celebrate!