Future Home of the Living God (Erdrich)

Future Home of the Living God 
Louise Erdrich, 2017
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062694058


Summary
A startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event.

The world as we know it is ending.

Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans.

Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.

Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby’s origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity.

There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot.

The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe.

A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 7, 1954
• Where—Little Falls, Minnesota, USA
• Education—A.B., Dartmouth College; M.A., Johns Hopkins
• Awards—National Book Award; National Book Critics Circle Awards (2); Nelson Algren Prize
• Currently—lives in Minnesota


Karen Louise Erdrich is an author of some 20 novels, as well as poetry, short stories, and children's books. She has some Native American ancestry and is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.

In 1984, Erdrich won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her debut novel, Love Medicine. In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and three years later, in 2012, she won the National Book Award for Round House.

Erdrich is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The eldest of seven children, Erdrich was born to Ralph and Rita Erdrich in Little Falls, Minnesota. Her father was German-American while her mother was French and Anishinaabe (Ojibwa). Her grandfather Patrick Gourneau served as a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school.

She attended Dartmouth College in 1972-1976, earning an AB degree and meeting her future husband, the Modoc anthropologist and writer Michael Dorris. He was then director of the college’s Native American Studies program. Subsequently, Erdrich worked in a wide variety of jobs, including as a lifeguard, waitress, poetry teacher at prisons, and construction flag signaler. She also became an editor for The Circle, a newspaper produced by and for the urban Native population in Boston. Erdrich graduated with a Master of Arts degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1979.

In the period 1978-1982, Erdrich published many poems and short stories. It was also during this period that she began collaborating with Dorris, initially working through the mail while Dorris was working in New Zealand. The relationship progressed, and the two were married in 1981. During this time, Erdrich assembled the material that would eventually be published as the poetry collection Jacklight.

In 1982, Erdrich's story "The World’s Greatest Fisherman" was awarded the $5,000 Nelson Algren Prize for short fiction. This convinced Erdrich and Dorris, who continued to work collaboratively, that they should embark on writing a novel.

Early Novels
In 1984, Erdrich published the novel Love Medicine. Made up of a disjointed but interconnected series of short narratives, each told from the perspective of a different character, and moving backwards and forward in time through every decade between the 1930s and the present day, the book told the stories of several families living near each other on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation.

The innovative techniques of the book, which owed a great deal to the works of William Faulkner but have little precedent in Native-authored fiction, allowed Erdrich to build up a picture of a community in a way entirely suited to the reservation setting. She received immediate praise from author/critics such as N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor, and the book was awarded the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. It has never subsequently been out of print.

Erdrich followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen, which continued her technique of using multiple narrators, but surprised many critics by expanding the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota. Native characters are very much kept in the background in this novel, while Erdrich concentrates on the German-American community. The action of the novel takes place mostly before World War II.

The Beet Queen was subject to a bitter attack from Native novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, who accused Erdrich of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples.

Erdrich and Dorris’ collaborations continued through the 1980s and into the 1990s, always occupying the same fictional universe.

Tracks goes back to the early 20th century at the formation of the reservation and introduces the trickster figure of Nanapush, who owes a clear debt to Nanabozho. Erdrich’s novel most rooted in Anishinaabe culture (at least until Four Souls), it shows early clashes between traditional ways and the Roman Catholic Church.

The Bingo Palace updates but does not resolve various conflicts from Love Medicine: set in the 1980s, it shows the effects both good and bad of a casino and a factory being set up among the reservation community. Finally, Tales of Burning Love finishes the story of Sister Leopolda, a recurring character from all the former books, and introduces a new set of white people to the reservation universe.

Erdrich and Dorris wrote The Crown of Columbus, the only novel to which both writers put their names, and A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, credited to Dorris. Both of these were set away from the Argus reservation.

Domestic Life
The couple had six children, three of them adopted. Dorris had adopted the children when he was single. After their marriage, Erdrich also adopted them, and the couple had three daughters together. Some of the children had difficulties.

In 1989 Dorris published The Broken Cord, a book about fetal alcohol syndrome, from which their adopted son Reynold Abel suffered. Dorris had found it was a widespread and until then relatively undiagnosed problem among Native American children because of mothers' alcohol issues. In 1991, Reynold Abel was hit by a car and killed at age 23.

In 1995 their son Jeffrey Sava accused them both of child abuse. Dorris and Erdrich unsuccessfully pursued an extortion case against him. Shortly afterward, Dorris and Erdrich separated and began divorce proceedings. Erdrich claimed that Dorris had been depressed since the second year of their marriage.

On April 11, 1997, Michael Dorris committed suicide in Concord, New Hampshire.

Later Writings
Erdrich’s first novel after divorce, The Antelope Wife, was the first to be set outside the continuity of the previous books. She has subsequently returned to the reservation and nearby towns, and has produced five novels since 1998 dealing with events in that fictional area. Among these are The Master Butchers Singing Club, a macabre mystery which again draws on Erdrich's Native American and German-American heritage, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Both have geographic and character connections with The Beet Queen.

Together with several of her previous works, these have drawn comparisons with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels. The successive novels have created multiple narratives in the same fictional area and combined the tapestry of local history with current themes and modern consciousness.

In The Plague of Doves, Erdrich has continued the multi-ethnic dimension of her writing, weaving together the layered relationships among residents of farms, towns and reservations; their shared histories, secrets, relationships and antipathies; and the complexities for later generations of re-imagining their ancestors' overlapping pasts. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

Erdrich's 2010 book, Shadow Tag, was a departure for her, as she focuses on a failed marriage.

Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Ojibwa and Chippewa). Erdrich also has German, French and American ancestry. One sister, Heidi, publishes under the name Heid E. Erdrich; she is a poet who also resides in Minnesota. Another sister, Lise Erdrich, has written children's books and collections of fiction and essays. For the past few years, the three Erdrich sisters have hosted annual writers workshops on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

The award-winning photographer Ronald W. Erdrich is one of their cousins. He lives and works in Abilene, Texas. He was named "Star Photojournalist of the Year" in 2004 by the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors association. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(Featured review.) [S]tartling…. Erdrich’s characters are brave and conscientious, but… they act mostly as vehicles for Erdrich’s ideas. Those ideas, however…are strikingly relevant.… A cautionary tale for this very moment in time.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Masterful…a breakout work of speculative fiction…Erdrich enters the realm of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale…A tornadic, suspenseful, profoundly provoking novel of life’s vulnerability and insistence…with a bold apocalyptic theme, searing social critique, and high-adrenaline action.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Dreamlike, suspenseful…this novel is bracing, humane, dedicated to witnessing the plight of women in a cruel universe, and full of profound spiritual questions and observations. Like some of Erdrich’s earlier work, it shifts adroitly in time and has a thoughtful, almost mournful insight into life on a Native reservation.… There is much to rue in this novel about our world but also hope for salvation.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Future Home of the Living God … then take off on your own:

1. Talk about Cedar Hawk Songmaker. How would you describe her? What traits does she possess that enable her to navigate this new world? What about her adoptive parents, Sera and Glen Songmaker: has Louise Erdrich drawn them as parodies or as authentic liberals?

 2. What is it about the letter from Mary Potts that irritates Cedar? Why does she decide to make the trip up to the reservation to meet Mary? What are her expectations for the three Mary Pottses—and do the women fulfill those expectations? Consider the moment when Sweetie speaks before the Indian Council and uses the word "caveat": where you surprised at her choice of the word? Or were you surprised at Cedar's surprise that she used the word? In other words, was Cedar condescending in her attitude toward Sweetie? What about Eddy—what is he like? Were you surprised by his erudition?

3. Why did Cedar convert to Catholicism? How would you describe her spiritual/religious beliefs? Why is she so fascinated by the article, "The Madonna's Conception Through the Ear," and in what way is her curiosity connected to the coming birth of her own child? What is your own thinking about the "word" or "Word" whispered to Mary—is it an actual word … or an idea?

4. Follow-up to Question 3: Why does Cedar refer to the baby's father as an "angel" and to his brown wings? What is the symbolic significance of the couple's love-making in the various costumes in the basement of their church.
 
5. Cedar writes, "The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don't know what is happening." What does she mean? Are there parallels (or warnings?) in Erdrich's book that pertain to our own world, the one we're living in? In what way are our current societal anxieties given voice in this novel?

6. Why is the government rounding up pregnant women? How are women seen as the possible salvation of the human species?

7. Why is Sera, as she admits to Cedar, not happy about Cedar's pregnancy? Is it right that she's unhappy? Or do you think she is wrong, perhaps selfishly so? How would you feel in her situation?

8. Eddy tells Cedar, "Indians have been adapting since before 1492 so I guess we'll all keep adapting." Then he adds, [The world's] always going to pieces." Is he right—that societies have always regrouped, reformed, and rebuilt after disasters? Or this this current disaster, the one in the novel, different?

9. Earlier, Cedar writes that "Our bodies have always remembered who we were. And now they have decided to return. We’re climbing back down the swimming-pool ladder into the primordial soup." Is there a cause given for the devolution of the species? Is it the activation of redundant genes that have lain dormant for millions of years (p. 106)? If so, why is it happening all at once—throughout the animal and plant kingdoms? Or is it that God has simply tired of human kind, as Phil suggests?

10. As society begins to collapse in the novel, does it unravel the way you would expect it to? Consider the New Constitution or the postal service's hiring of private contractors to protect the mail deliverers on their rounds. Does the unraveling seem unrealistic, maybe over-the-top? Or is Erdrich's dystopian vision realistic, perhaps even feasible—in other words, can you see it actually happening?

11. SPOILER ALERT: What do you think of Phil—both at the beginning of the novel, when we first meet him, and by the end? Do you blame him for giving up names? Cedar is angry with him … or is she? Does his turn-coat action at the end seem out of character for him?

12. SPOILER ALERT: Were Sera and Glen right to have withheld from Cedar the truth about her birth father? Did your attitude toward Glen change after learning of his affair with Sweetie?

13. What is the meaning of the book's title? On August 9, as Cedar is driving up to meet Mary Potts, she passes a billboard in a bare, weedy field that reads "Future Home of the Living God." Why might Erdrich have taken it as the title for her novel?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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