Read Maria's responses to popular apocalyptic literature. |
Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God surprises readers with quite the creative twist on the apocalypse. In this book, you will not find a devastating super-virus nor will you encounter raging flesh-eating zombies. Erdrich chooses to attack the world at large with an evolutionary reversal—animals and human evolution jumps “backward…sideways, or in unforeseen directions” (pg. 54-55). Nature changes by storm: “ducks are not ducks and chickens are not chickens, insects are nutritious, and there are ladybugs the size of cats” (pg. 90). Society begins to collapse from the fear of nature’s reversal as a new religious government rises to authority and terrorizes pregnant women in order to ensure the continuation of the homo sapien species. Unlike the subject of last week’s post, The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, and next week’s post, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Erdrich’s apocalypse does not eliminate the population of earth. Her dystopia centers around change. Government, evolution, freedoms, and dangers all shift. Change is at the root of what made 2020 feel like an apocalypse for so many. The narrator, Cedar Songmaker, pregnant and avoiding “gravid female detention” spends her days quarantining in her home. Now that may sound a bit familiar. Cedar’s life, any activity of work or play, was suddenly removed, just as every event and trip of the 2020 calendar year was canceled. The presence of new dangers is another striking similarity. You tell me, have you ever feared walking outside of your home because of the saber-toothed tiger running around your backyard? (If evolution ever does reverse, be sure to watch out for that.) In Covid times, new fears have risen—it has become dangerous for at-risk individuals to do normal things like go to the grocery store. Mental health problems create an increasing danger for many struggling through quarantine. William Wan, writer for the Washington Post, reports on the rise in suicidal thoughts during the pandemic. Between 2018 and August 2020, the number of young adults with suicidal thoughts rose from 10.7% to 25.5%, and in all ages from 4.3% to 11.0%. As previously mentioned, the novel is written from the perspective of Cedar Songmaker, pregnant, half Ojibwe Native American, member of the Catholic faith. The novel takes the form of Cedar’s journal to her unborn baby. She writes to cope unknowns weighing on her and the future of her baby. These unknowns are what makes Erdrich’s writing so captivating to me. I turned every page wanting to know more. Erdrich threads the theme of mystery and the unknown through the narrative. Cedar was incapable of knowing what was going on around her or inside of her, as shown when she pondered “our baby, like every other baby on the earth, will be a throwback of some kind” (pg. 67-68) She had no idea if her baby would be a homo sapien, like you and me, or another version of humanity’s evolutionary history. Even worse, she did not know if she or her baby would survive the birth, with only a 15-20% chance of survival. The coronavirus pandemic has forced everyone into unknown territory. Uncertainty has become as much of a theme of the past year as change and danger. Unfortunately uncertainly left Erdrich’s readers with an ending that felt more like a cliff hanger than a conclusion. After turning the last page with several unanswered questions, I went online to search for answers to question I may have missed in my quick read. Rather than answers, I found critiques. Literary reviewers found flaws in a novel that left so many loose ends. Ruth Franklin from the New York Times commented in her review of the novel that “Because of the diary form, the novel’s perspective is limited to what Cedar experiences personally or hears about, which also results in tantalizing plot points that aren’t followed through.” It was comforting to know that someone else had the same issues as me, and I hadn’t unwittingly skipped over some major detail that would tie things together. While enjoyable and engaging, Future Home of the Living God was anything but satisfying. However, this may have been intentional for Erdrich. The apocalypse is not a satisfying subject, and Erdrich may be conveying the message that some questions may never be answered. This is a tough pill to swallow, but it may help us recover and soon move on from the small apocalypse we are all living through now.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
|