future home of the living god by louise erdrich

Mary’s teenage daughter is a snarling goth dressed in black. Her mother bears the name of Mary Potts and reveals that when she gave birth to Cedar Hawk she considered herself a Punk. That’s easier said than done, for when she does meet her birth mother and family, the longtime objects of her fantasies, they hardly check all the boxes she expected. As Cedar Hawk observes, they are also genuinely kind human beings who have cared deeply for her, even amid her tumultuous adolescence when she vowed to shed her upper-middle class upbringing for an authentically Native American persona. But they are, for sure, Volvo-driving, vegan-eating lawyers for nonprofits who refuse to allow guns in the house. Though they marry, symbolically if not legally, midway through the book, it’s Cedar Hawk’s family that gets more of her love.Įrdrich won’t quite turn Cedar Hawk’s parents, Sera and Glen, into caricatures. There is a man in the picture, a gentle ecologist named Phil, with whom she shares a liberal Catholic worldview.

Her sometimes breathless diary entries are intended to be read one day by the fetus she’s carrying. Offred’s narrator counterpart is Cedar Hawk Songmaker, a 26-year-old woman born in an Ojibwe reservation in upstate Minnesota and adopted by white Minneapolis liberals. More ominously, evolution seems to be moving in reverse, as creatures formerly seen only in museums of natural history loom in backyards and most babies look like eerie predecessors of Homo sapiens. Erdrich has imagined a world in which climate change has fast-forwarded from imminent to here-and-now. In “Future Home,” it’s only hinted at as streets are renamed for Bible verses.Įcological disaster plays a larger and scarier role in the new book. What’s more, both patriarchies have emerged out of ultraconservative Christianity, though this genesis is more explicit in Atwood’s Republic of Gilead.

Future home of the living god by louise erdrich