Since 1984 Love Medicinethe first of her 18 novels, award-winning author Louise Erdrich reaches ever wider and deeper across the contours of her native country – here, as the title of The mighty red signals, centered on the river which has been so powerfully inscribed in this landscape and its generations.

As always, Erdrich’s hybrid ancestry—she is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and descends from German-American roots on her father’s side—richly informs her multi-layered exploration of her characters and the land. As always, his characters are driven by love and desire, often thwarted, diverted or distorted. And as always, Erdrich’s mastery of language, evident on every page, surprises, arrests and provokes with every clear turn of phrase.

Each new Erdrich novel probes more incisively the dynamics of relationships – between children and parents, between married couples, between lawyers, bankers, priests, farmers and eccentrics. The mighty red anatomizes the stages of marriage, from ardent proposal to long-standing marital boredom to the surprising returns of deceased spouses or lovers. Along the way, Erdrich lays bare the inner lives of his characters with a compassion that is both surgically incisive and omniscient; the paired perspective invites readers both inside and beyond the characters’ dilemmas.

The plot of The mighty red first turns to the progress of the courtship of a troubled teenager, Gary Geist, and the prophetic name Kismet, who is at best ambivalent about him. As Erdrich follows their unlikely union and its devolution, we learn of Kismet’s mother Crystal’s apprehensions regarding the relationship and follow the breakdown of her own idiosyncratic marriage to Martin, who apparently eloped mid-novel with a large part of the economies of the wider community.

Meanwhile, Kismet is strongly attracted to another young man, Hugo, who leaves her and their passionate but clandestine relationship to seek his fortune. Hugo works in a bookstore – another familiar and evocative setting in Erdrich’s fiction (who herself owns a bookstore in Minneapolis) – while the wider world of beet farming (again, a familiar d ‘Erdrich) monitors everyone’s fate.

Throughout, Erdrich’s prose invites his readers to dwell on the drama of his phrasing. The story is eminently quotable — here’s Hugo, returning from his parents’ house to buy a used car: “From the highway to the sad, secret tree-lined streets of the lost south side of the railroad tracks, little houses and elderberries with large boxwoods, maples, Siberian elms, a few massive and indomitable oaks shaking their branches towards the iron sky.

Accentuating the drama of evocative language, the novel is composed of very short sections, ranging from half a page to four, each titled and each both self-contained and driven by the gathered force of the characters’ entanglements. In turn, these short sections are assembled into “Parts”, each also appropriately but ironically titled (“The Proposal”, “The Vows”, “Honeymoon”, The Wedding Dinner”) which bring together their own momentum cumulative and increasingly disturbing towards the dark revelation of the novel.

The feeling of foreboding is masterfully paced; we’re aware from the start that something is wrong with Gary Geist’s infatuation with Kismet, but it’s not until late in the narrative that the details are revealed. The same goes for Martin’s disappearance; it is as if these major plot elements are the backdrop to a larger drama governed by the rhythms of the natural landscape, the river, the weather and the seasons, of generations that play out across the individual dilemmas of the characters.

It’s important not to overshadow Erdrich’s revelation, because its late appearance in the narrative is exactly where it should arise. The titular river has been a major character throughout The mighty redbut for what purpose, and to what nature or degree, should we rely on the masterful rhythms of the novel.

Like the river, Erdrich remains at the height of his power.

Neil Besner taught Love Medicine at the University of Winnipeg in the last century.