Pregnant women are being rounded up by agents of the new religious government, called "The Church of the New Constitution." The women give birth in prison-like maternity hospitals and, afterwards, it seems they may face a future of enforced serial pregnancies. Nature has doubled back on itself and plants and animals and fetuses seem to be randomly devolving. Cedar is impelled to write these letters because, well, something weird is going on. Rather than standing in the shadow of Atwood's classic, Erdrich's tense and lyrical new work of speculative fiction stands shoulder-to-braced-shoulder right alongside it.įuture Home of the Living God is loosely structured as a series of letters that our heroine, a 26-year-old woman named Cedar Hawk Songmaker, writes to her unborn child. The somewhat unsettling answer is "Sure!"Įrdrich reminds us here that the unthinkable could happen in a variety of ways. After Margaret Atwood's magisterial achievement, is there really room for another dystopian feminist novel about the overthrow of democracy by a Christian fundamentalist regime that enslaves fertile women and reduces them to simple vessels of procreation?
How?īefore I finally picked up and read Louise Erdrich's new novel, called Future Home of the Living God, there was a mighty obstacle that had to be faced - an obstacle called The Handmaid's Tale. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Future Home of the Living God Author Louise Erdrich
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