We’ve come to know Louise Erdrich as an established writer thanks to novels like “Love Medicine,” so it may come as a surprise that her most recent work tackles broad and philosophical questions in a dystopian setting. Her latest novel, “Future Home of the Living God” (Harper, 2017), combines poetic prose with fantastical ideas to create a spellbinding reading experience.
The protagonist, 26-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, is our guide into an America where a totalitarian state rules and babies are being born with animal traits.
The novel feels like a combination of scientific exploration and literary dystopia. The scientific aspects of the plot deal with biological concepts: evolution itself is reversing and human births have gone awry. Indeed, babies are being born with primitive qualities, as if evolution were taking a step backward. It’s is a chilling reminder that all people, both real and fictional, are creatures by default.
To deal with this anomaly in births, the government in rounding up all pregnant women. Cedar herself is pregnant and must lie low. Such social commentary hearkens back to literature from the Augustan Age in Britain, an era that included the classic “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift. Taken this way, the story is an allegory or parody.
Still, “Future Home of the Living God” appears to be a warning about a nightmarish future and encourages readers to practice eternal vigilance that would (hopefully) prevent such chaos.
In spite of such bleak content, the novel itself is beautiful in many ways. The prose is very stylized, elegant and eloquent. Cedar Hawk Songmaker is a fabulous character because of her own self-determination to achieve her goals, especially finding her birth mother, Mary Potts. Cedar’s name is also very symbolic because she is the composer of her own figurative “song,” which is her own personal narrative that flows like music. Cedar could serve as a great role model for women who feel oppressed in modern times while encouraging women to stand up for themselves.
Louise Erdrich is a renowned Native American writer and in this work she beautifully explores the trials and tribulations that women face given the patriarchal nature of modern society. There has been a lot of recent advocacy for the rights of women in the real world, and Erdrich’s novel contributes to that current social movement. People might never know what the meaning of life is, and life might never be explained clearly, but “Future Home of the Living God” will always be a great contemporary novel that explores such profound questions poetically.
Alex Andy Phuong graduated from California State University-Los Angeles with his Bachelor of Arts in English in 2015. He currently writes articles and film reviews online. Alex is a very altruistic person who enjoys volunteering online and in real life daily. Finally, he believes in the power of hope and creative expression, and strives to continue learning forevermore.
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