There was an exchange on Twitter that went viral recently: a man, deliberately trolling, wrote: “Look out the window and name one thing women have made.” Without missing a beat, a woman tweeted back: “EVERY. SINGLE. HUMAN. BEING.” The power of female fertility is simultaneously so mundane as to be overlooked and so significant that it remains the principle battleground in culture and gender wars, a tool or a weapon to be appropriated by those who seek to control the masses. Feminists and writers of speculative fiction have long known this. “The control of women and babies has been a feature of every repressive regime on the planet,” wrote Margaret Atwood earlier this year, on why her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale is resonating so forcefully in the age of Trump.
Now Louise Erdrich tackles the subject in her 16th novel. Set in an imminent future where twentysomethings just about remember snow from childhood, Future Home of the Living God owes an obvious debt to Atwood, as well as to PD James’s The Children of Men, though Erdrich also weaves in themes of Native American history, politics and the nuances of family relationships familiar from her most recent novels, The Round House and LaRose. Here, the narrative takes the form of a secret diary, written by Cedar Hawk Songmaker and addressed to her unborn child. Cedar is Ojibwe, though her lyrical name was bestowed by her liberal white adoptive parents (“happily married vegans”). Four months into her unplanned pregnancy, Cedar sets out in search of her birth family to learn more of her genetic history.
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