A farewell to snow

Last summer I led a book club discussion on Louise Erdrich’s dystopian novel Future Home of the Living God. The online gathering was organized by a nonprofit that focuses on spirituality for a climate-changed world. I was glad to talk about one of my favorite novelists.

Erdrich, who is enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is a prolific writer whose stories of Natives on and off reservation are haunting and humorous and often break my heart. I hadn’t read Future Home of the Living God before. It’s a bit different from many of her novels: set in Minneapolis in the not too distant future, it tells the story of a young woman who was adopted out of a tribe farther north in Minnesota and is now pregnant. In this dystopian future, humans have stopped evolving or have begun devolving in ways not quite named. Pregnant women are being detained by the authorities and imprisoned in birthing centers. The implication—again, not narrated graphically—is that women bearing devolved fetuses will be terminated along with their children, while women bearing healthy fetuses will be forced to bear more in order to ensure the continued survival of the fittest.

Apparently Erdrich started the novel and then shelved it for a decade. She picked it up again and finished it in 2017, when its plot was starting to sound less fantastic and more plausible. The book explores themes of political disintegration and human devolution. As the young woman’s pregnancy unfolds, she tries to evade the authorities while also reconnecting with her birth mother and Ojibwe family on the reservation.