Sometimes I see comments about the books I read as being difficult, with the implication or explicit statement that they couldn't or wouldn't read those novels But I don't consider the books I read to be difficult. I think of them as explorations, as wonderings, as portraits that contain intense close-ups with broader implications, about various aspects of the human condition.
Well, this was a book that was a bit more difficult for me to read. Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God is a story that considers what happens when evolution begins to go backward, western civilization collapses and social constructs fall apart. A young Ojibwe woman raised by a white couple is pregnant. Pregnant women are being imprisoned. Most of the births do not go well.
Yes, this is Handmaid's Tale territory. But it is a different take on this attack of women and our right to be in charge of our own bodies. The young woman carrying a baby, Cedar Hawk Songmaker, holds on to her essential belief that her baby will be all right. Her baby will survive and not be deformed, no matter what nature and mankind try to do to her and to the child.
She's going to need that inner strength. When civilization falls apart, the religious authoritarians take control. Even going into hiding is no guarantee Cedar will not be found and kidnapped. Whether anyone closest to her can be trusted is undetermined. But Cedar does trust her parents, both sets of them. The white couple who adopted her, and her Ojibwe mother and stepfather all provide support in their own way. Her white mother Sera and Ojibwe stepfather Eddy are particular standouts, and they are two of the other characters most visualized during the story.
While it seems at first that the father of Cedar's child, a young white man, is not clearly drawn, remembering that as a teenager he fixated on the Land O’Lakes stereotypical Indian maiden and figured out how to add to her cleavage by folding the butter package says enough. Boy, bye.
The basic story is horrific, and all too plausible. That scene in the cave referenced in last week's diary is definitely not for the squeamish.
But this novel is more than the basic storyline. And there are plot points throughout that are not handled with Erdrich's usual grace. For example, the baby's due date being December 25 is rather heavy-handed. However, since she took the novel out of its resting place after several years when Trump took over the White House, because of the urgency of what we are all facing, it's understandable that fears would be more powerful than any gift in storytelling.
So to find the ideas and the wonderings in this novel was a gift. Because the parts of Future Home of the Living God that dwell on the ideas and wonderings are the parts that sing. They are a combination of science, reason and faith as a way to look at the mysteries of the world we live in, and to marvel at the glory found there. Even in the face of nature pulling a fast one on living creatures and humanity showing its ugliness.
Sometimes these wonderings seem like an aside, as in the following from a paper Cedar was reading before things started changing, that she is considering anew, titled "The Madonna's Conception Through the Ear". What? Who cares? The world as we know it is ending, the Christian bullies are kidnapping women and babies are not surviving birth. But consider this anyway:
... it is an examination of the belief that God's whispered breath caused the Incarnation. After twenty minutes, I put the pages down.
"What did he --say--?" ...
The word intrigues me, now more than ever, the idea of a word so uncanny, a word so powerful a word actually so divine that its expression infuses a woman's body with a pregnancy of godly nature.
...The word is an idea, the idea of God. ... Still, the idea of this actual word continues to preoccupy me and to suggest that somewhere outside the actual human experience of words spoken, words thought, there exists a language or perhaps a pre-language made up of words so unthinkably holy they cannot be said, much less known.
... And perhaps there is a word that has changed the course of human existence.
What a marvelous idea to contemplate in the midst of chaos and fear. And because this is Erdrich, it is true that the word could be the cause of wreckage, but it is at least as likely that it is the cause of a greater good. Or at least the source of solace.
The philosophy, the wondering and the marveling in this book, are encapsulated in this:
I don't know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.
Ain't it the truth?
Erdrich's Cedar also realizes that regardless of the outside world, whether it is a positive era for humanity or one in which oppression reigns even more forcefully than usual, carrying a baby is not the most realistic thing to do. It is usually fraught with danger, it is easy for things to go wrong. But oh, the rewards that are possible. Just typing those words, my eyes are tearing up at the miracle that my child is, and the wonderful things he is doing with his life, and the joy he has brought to me and other members of our family.
Future Home of the Living God is a difficult but rewarding novel. Cedar's sense of amazement and faith that her child will be fine help the reader consider how marginalized people have always adapted and are the stronger for it. Cedar is a woman of faith, not the faith of the religious conservatives who imprison pregnant women, but faith that mysteries abound and are to be honored. This is a novel that commemorates the bond between mother and unborn child, and its connection to the bond between earth and living creatures.