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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Book Week continues. At the center of Louise Erdrich's new novel is a classic love triangle. There's Gary, a jock recovering from the fallout of a terrible accident. He's determined that his girlfriend, a former Goth named Kismet, is the person who can save them. He proposes three times. Kismet, a half Ojibwe woman, is going places, college, her mom hopes, but something about Gary's persistence gets to her. She says yes to marriage, even though she's not really sure she loves him. She might actually have stronger feelings for a friend named Hugo, an intelligent but slightly dorky son of a local bookstore owner. Hugo is determined to win Kismet's heart, even if it means ending her marriage.

All of this takes place in a small North Dakota town in 2008 and 2009 as the recession starts to reshape the community. Also in this town, of course, are the parents of these teenagers who have lots of thoughts about what's going on. The novel is titled The Mighty Red, and it's a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. When she joined us to talk about The Mighty Red, I started by asking Louise what she first set out to accomplish when she started writing.

Louise Erdrich: You know, when you set out to write a book, all you want to accomplish is get the words on the page that are seething around in you and you don't really-- I never know really what's going to come out of it, but I wanted to write about the people living along The Red River. That's the Mighty Red and it's the Red River of the North. The river flows north and because it flows north, the water above the very beginning where this book is set hasn't thawed yet. The thawed river runs into the ice and it floods. And the floods are so dramatic in the spring, sometimes they've just covered sort of thousands of acres of farmland. So that's what I'm writing my-- a river that cannot be contained, really, and love that cannot be contained.

Alison Stewart: Location, let's stay with location because it's set in Tabor, North Dakota. Seems like the adults are from Tabor and just never, never really left. What was it like in your mind to be raised and to live in Tabor?

Louise Erdrich: Well, I was raised in a small town in North Dakota, so I knew that, but then I thought about, "What if I hadn’t left?" and I was able to really think that through because I go back all the time. My mother, my brother, my sister, all of us go back. It's quite a wonderful town so a lot of people visit it because it has a wonderful zoo, although that doesn't appear in the book. Anyway, it wasn't hard to imagine what it would have been like to stay because I am there a lot.

Alison Stewart: At the center of the story is a reluctant engagement between two teenagers, Gary the jock and Kismet. Kismet takes her a while to say yes to Gary's proposal.

Louise Erdrich: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Alison Stewart: Even so, she seems very unsure. She's not sure about this at all. What does the future with Gary mean to Kismet?

Louise Erdrich: Well, because things happen with her family-- I mean, this is set in 2008.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Louise Erdrich: And there's a tremendous economic feeling of anxiety, and doom, and people are very worried. Part of it is economic. He's a wealthy farmer. He also is cool. He has this cool--

Alison Stewart: There's a vibe about him, kind of.

Louise Erdrich: Yeah, he's just got this vibe of, "I am cool and I am confident and I can take care of everything." Well, actually, he's terrified and he's desperate for her for a certain reason that you find out later.

Alison Stewart: Initially, it's Kismet's mom's like, "I don't know about this."

Louise Erdrich: Oh, yeah. She is not in favor.

Alison Stewart: And it sort of sends Kismet towards him, right?

Louise Erdrich: Well, a little bit, and her mother really tries not to do that. All mothers know that anyone they oppose in their-- basically, anything that you oppose is liable to set up the opposite result, right? So she opposes, but it's a mistake and she knows it right away.

Alison Stewart: But on Gary's side of the family, as you write here, "With savage determination, she had planned the wedding," Winnie.

Louise Erdrich: Yeah, Gary's mother is-- and this is weird to everyone, Gary's mother is quite desperate for Kismet to marry her son too. And why is that? People think it has to do with the aftermath of something that happens, something very, very bad that happens, but nobody knows quite what's going on with them. Winnie is a really loving mother. She really adores her son, so she will try to get Kismet too, and it's strange to be corralled in by Gary's mom.

Alison Stewart: Gary is white. Kismet is Ojibwe. And at one point, Gary says there was something mysterious and magical about Kismet and dating her helped Gary feel sane. He suspected it was her Indian-- oops, Native American blood, though he never mentioned it again after the first time. How does race factor into their relationship, if at all?

Louise Erdrich: Well, in this case, with Gary and Kismet, he is not sure why it is that she has this effect on him. He tries to attribute it to maybe her background, but it really is because she is very kind. She's a kind Goth. She's a lapsed Goth, but she's been raised to be a kind person. Her mother is hardworking, kind, thrifty. I mean, it has all these great virtues. She's also quite hard headed and so is Kismet, really. But a number of other things, which I don't want to give away happened that land her with Gary.

Alison Stewart: Let's enter Hugo, Bring Hugo into the conversation.

Louise Erdrich: Oh, I love Hugo. You know, so many people identify with Hugo. I've been out-

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Louise Erdrich: -on the tour here and I get more people who identify with Hugo than anyone else. He's the nerdish kind of homeschool, gentle giant who's-

Alison Stewart: Kind of a genius, a little bit.

Louise Erdrich: -kind of a genius, a little bit, but also a little bit like-- I mean, he has no respect for anything but-- He decides right off that he will persuade Kismet into adultery, which, he sort of likes the word anyway because he's not even quite an adult. He's a bit younger than she is.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Louise Erdrich: Yeah, but he decides that he will go to the North Dakota oil fields, fake all his IDs, get a car and get up there and amass a fortune. He imagines a fortune coming out of-- everybody imagined a fortune coming out of those fields, come back and just take her away, and he knows that she loves him.

Alison Stewart: Why did it have to be that complicated?

Louise Erdrich: I know.

Alison Stewart: Why couldn't they just be together? Not you as the author, but just in their world, why couldn't they?

Louise Erdrich: Well, because, teenagers are so complicated and nothing's simple, nothing's direct because you don't quite know-- and this was me too. I didn't quite know my mind and I thought maybe I'm not feeling the feelings I'm feeling. Maybe the feelings I'm feeling are some feelings somebody else has or somebody else is telling me to feel. It's very hard to sort all these things out. I love teenagers.

Alison Stewart: You like writing teenagers?

Louise Erdrich: I like writing teenagers, yes, and I've had four daughters. I loved their teen years because I could see that happening and I loved being there for It. It's a time that it's not easy sometimes. Crystal, the mother, for instance, does know that she's got to stay really cool when she-- She can't criticize Gary, but at some point, she can't help it. At some point, you have to be who you are too with teenagers and you can't-- it's a sort of thing where you don't want to manipulate each other, but teens and parents are always trying to see where the give is in the other person.

Alison Stewart: All right, we've talked about Kismet, we've talked about the marriage, we've talked about Hugo possibly interrupting the marriage. I do want to mention that Gary was involved in some sort of horrible accident and it led to-- I'm not giving too much away, but led to some deaths of kids in town. How is Gary affected by survivor's guilt or not?

Louise Erdrich: Well, he is and isn't. He can't quite come to terms with the fact that he's going to be haunted and he doesn't know-- some of his guilt and his inability to take responsibility takes the form of seeing people who were in that accident and being pursued sometimes, but he doesn't feel it around. Kismet. But however, I have to go back to Hugo. He's not going to just interrupt. He's going to be-- He's like, "I'm going to be a homewrecker. Yes, that's where I am. I'm going to wreck it. I'm going to burn it down. I want her."

That's what's fun about the book, is that Hugo is like, "No, no, I'm not having any of this," and he's a lot of fun to write. But it's also about sugar beets and the cost of the sugar we eat. I'm a person with a sweet tooth, so I eat a lot of sugar, but I did want to know the cost. What is the cost? I interviewed a friend who's a sugar beet hauler for the sugar company, and he had totaled up every one of his hauls, the mileage, the gallons used, and the tonnage of sugar beets. He came out with having used in 23 years about 30.5 tankers of gasoline to haul those sugar beets.

Tankers each hold about 8,000 gallons of gas, so not only that, but there is hundreds of trucks hauling those beets, the factories, the sugar factories are powered by coal. It's just an enormous amount goes into our sugar. I don't think that has to be that way. I think there's a lot of other things besides pesticides and oil that can be used, but I wanted to know. I wanted to know what was happening. It was really fascinating, the history of it and what it is now.

Alison Stewart: That was Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich speaking about her latest book, The Mighty Red.