The literary mixes with the colloquial, as in Erdrich’s other fiction ( Love Medicine, The Round House), but the colloquial has the edge.

The novel promises to be both apocalyptic and dystopian, but it takes its time getting there. But what the reader might expect to be a dark and brooding story is instead frequently flush with knowing hilarity. Additionally, our devolution, as Erdrich imagines it, is not merely biological, it’s political and social, as well. After all, as the narrator, 32-year-old mother-to-be Cedar Hawk Songmaker, points out, evolution was intuited from many different pieces of evidence, and it’s been known to push species sideways as much as it has forward. As the novel opens, we’re devolving, though it’s not a straight or linear path backward.

That is the central, wonderful premise of Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God. But what if suddenly women were giving birth to babies that emerged as some regressed, earlier form of human? Society as we know it would surely collapse. Meanwhile, for babies, their mothers or caregivers are their entire world, a governing force that controls all aspects of life. It’s a complete shift in worldview, a remaking of identity, a transformation that ripples out from the personal to the social and political. But for others, the birth of a baby is the destruction of one way of life, one way of being, and the start of another. Of course, many start out as tender, maternal people and experience few significant personality changes. There’s something both utterly mundane and completely shocking about bringing another human being into the world, and the process of adjusting to a new life - in both senses of the phrase - is challenging for many mothers, whether they admit it or not.

Future home of the living god