The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life. She is crying for the stranger to stand before her once again, to open herself. She knows who he is, now, the windigo. He is the original Shawano from way back in time, the windigo man whom the Shawano brothers took into their family in the old days, long ago. Here's how she heard it. They were hunting together way up north, those brothers and their families. Visited by this ice spirit of awful hunger, they let him in the door. They should not have. He was all frost inside, all ravenous snow. Still, she wants him to come to her again. This time she will enter. Cleave to the glossy ice. Pull his cold sky-colored skin around her like a grave.

"Family stories," Louise Erdrich writes in The Antelope Wife, "repeat themselves in patterns and waves generation to generation, across bloods and time. Once the pattern is set we go on replicating it." This is perhaps as good a key to the fictions of Louise Erdrich as any, with their genealogical charts in the flyleaf as complex as a high fantasy novel, or perhaps a biography of a Renaissance monarch. In The Antelope Wife, the family is the Shawano-Roy family, stretching from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the 20th. It begins with a white soldier adopting a young indigenous girl he finds being carried on the back of a dog, until the girl's mother, desperate and raving, comes to find her. In another way, this girl--Matilda--is a dead end, genealogically speaking: the two branches of the family that become the novel's modern characters descend from her sisters by her birth mother and the natural son of her adoptive father, yet Matilda's position between worlds becomes an avatar for all the book's characters. In some way, she is their spiritual mother.

Erdrich finds a motif to express the interconnectedness of these family lines--see how they loop back on themselves in vaguely incestuous ways--in beads. "Who is beading us?" she asks. What are the forces that bind us together, and transmit patterns of life from generation to generation? These patterns show up as generational echoes, like the presence of twins. Young Cally Roy mourns the death of her twin Deanna; her twin grandmothers refuse to tell her mother Rozin which of them is really her mother. (Did I mention the mysterious twin grandmothers are themselves children of mysterious twin grandmothers?) This doubling can be traced back to Matilda's mother, Blue Prairie Woman, whose desperation for her child split her psyche in two and forced her to take on a new name. She recovers her daughter, but the split cannot be repaired; two spirits now live in the world. The doubling resonates with other kinds of transformations and slippages, identities that are fluid. Matilda's adoptive father, struggling to keep her alive in the wilderness, begins to lactate.

There's a certain recognizable Erdrich M.O. here; the interconnectedness of family lines is what makes people call a book like Love Medicine a novel rather than a collection of stories. But The Antelope Wife manages to bind its many threads into a whole piece in a way that Love Medicine never does. It might be the most successful of all of Erdrich's novels in this regard; it leaps time and place and point of view so haphazardly it seems a miracle that the whole thing hangs together at all. Its frenetic energy bolsters its humor, which is often of the lovesick foolishness variety: Klaus Shawano's unbridled horniness for his untameable wife Sweetheart Calico, or Rozin Roy's ex-husband Richard's destructive desperation to spoil her marriage to another man. Erdrich is an expert at weaving humor and tragedy together, as when Richard's abortive suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning ends up killing his daughter Deanna instead.

One character cuts through the tightly woven beads of family history, the title "Antelope Wife." In the modern era, she's Sweetheart Calico, Klaus' wife, who does not talk. She's an avatar of a figure that appears throughout generations, a woman who is--who is, ah--you know, Erdrich's brand of magical realism doesn't make these things easy to explain--also, I guess, an antelope, and who represents wildness, freedom, the fluid and the feminine. Klaus manages to coerce her into marriage by essentially kidnapping her, separating from her daughters, and in Minneapolis she is something like an animal pacing around a cage. Her relationship to the family is frail, oblique; when she is at last "freed" like a character in a fairy tale released from a spell, she returns to the wilderness, the place past understanding, where the bead makers are perhaps, making the story before the story.