Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

Looking back, I see that it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words of the Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture. This side of Catholicism, much of it cheapened and debased by mass production, was for me, nevertheless, the equivalent of Gothic cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts and mystery plays. I threw myself into it with ardor, this sensuous life, and when I was not dreaming that I was going to grow up to marry the pretender to the throne of France and win back his crown with him, I was dreaming of being a Carmelite nun, cloistered and penitential; I was also much attracted by an order of fallen women called the Magdalens.

When Mary McCarthy was a little girl, she took a train from Seattle to Minneapolis, where her parents meant to relocate near to her aunt and uncle. On that train, the entire family caught the Spanish flu, and by the time that McCarthy herself emerged from her convalescence, both of her parents were dead, having died within a day of each other. Thus began an unusual childhood, first under the care of her cruel resentful aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, then under her stern but caring Protestant uncle in Seattle. During that time, McCarthy latched onto the Catholicism of one side of her family, perhaps as a way of providing a consistency and continuity in a life of upheaval, or perhaps just because the grand drama of the Catholic religion can be appealing to a young girl. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a series of essays that chronicles these years of Mary's life.

One interesting thing that McCarthy does here is append an italicized afterword to each essay, presumably having been published somewhere else and at some other time, detailing how, where, and why, she'd taken poetic license. There's a great story of a rule-obsessed teacher at the Catholic boarding school who bonds with McCarthy over a love of Cicero's ancient fight with Cataline, but who nevertheless reports McCarthy--at the risk of expulsion--for sneaking out of the dormitory during the last week of school. I liked this one because it's an interesting profile of a recognizable kind of person, who clings to the rules for their own sake, despite the laxity that characterizes the actual figures of authority. But in the afterword, McCarthy describes how the timeline has been compressed to make the teacher's betrayal seem even more quixotic than it really was, how it probably wasn't just the day after they'd concluded their play, to great applause and aplomb from the student body.

As a book of essays, there isn't a strong throughline like a more traditional memoir, but this didn't bother me; McCarthy is such a strong, sensitive, and funny writer. In fact, I enjoyed this book a great deal more than her novel The Birds of America, having the funny-but-true verisimilitude of a real life, though perhaps not as much as the (in some ways, drawn equally from life) novel The Group. As the title suggests, the essays are drawn together perhaps by the strength of McCarthy's not-quite-cradle Catholicism. McCarthy captures well how a childhood religion can mix aesthetic and cultural concerns with deeper, more spiritual ones, how these can often be indistinguishable. As a teenager, McCarthy "loses her religion" as a kind of social ploy to receive sympathy and attention from her boarding school classmates, as well as the school's nuns and priests, but then a funny thing happens: she's not able to find it again. As ever happens, the pretenses we take end up becoming real.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Many books and movies had in their plots some echoes of my secret experiences with Flora. Places haunted by unquiet Indians were standard. Hotels were disturbed by Indians whose bones lay underneath the basements and floors--a neat psychic excavation of American unease with its brutal history. Plenty of what was happening to me happened in fiction. Unquiet Indians. What about unquiet settlers? Unquiet wannabes? According to Penstemon, the earth's magnetism directs many actions in an unseen world. Maybe the bookstore itself was located on some piece of earth crossed by mystical lines. These invisible runes had touched during what... a shift, perhaps cosmically... a solar storm--something had jostled reality.

What is a sentence? In one sense, it's a judgment, like the sentence handed down to Tookie, the narrator of Louise Erdrich's novel The Sentence, which unjustly keeps her locked up for many years. In another sense, of course, it's a string of words, one of the units from which a book is made, like the books that Tookie sells in a Minneapolis bookstore after her release. For Tookie, the bookstore--the real-life Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, owned and operated by Louise Erdrich herself, who appears in the novel--is quite literally a lifesaver. It's a place where she's given a second chance, and one surrounded by the very things, books, which kept her alive during her time in prison. But perhaps these two kinds of sentence are the same in the end: after all, our words have power to pass powerful judgments, even kill, as one seems to have recently killed a bookstore patron named Flora. But in Tookie's case, words have the power to save, to cleanse, and to heal as well.

The problem in The Sentence is not so much that Flora has died, but that she has come back and is haunting the bookstore, and Tookie specifically. Flora was a Pretendian, a white woman desperate to claim an indigenous identity. When Flora's spirit tries to forcibly enter Tookie, in an event Tookie describes as being zipped open and put on like a wetsuit, the imagery is clear enough. But both Tookie and Erdrich have a kind of sympathy for Flora as well, even in her misguided desperation, and Tookie's investigation into Flora's death suggests that she was killed by a sentence in a historical book that exposed the truth about her racial and cultural heritage. What Erdrich suggests is that, if settlers and Pretendians act on Indians like ineradicable spirits, impossible to fully exorcise, so do they haunt themselves, or cannot keep themselves from being haunted by the truth of their relationship to the world as it is.

The Sentence is almost certainly the most personal book that Erdrich has ever written. By writing herself into the book, Erdrich joins a long list of greats, including Patrick White and Martin Amis, who have fashioned themselves into characters in their own books. But The Sentence has a ripped-from-the-headlines quality, too, that follows those momentous events of 2020: the onslaught of COVID-19, which closes the bookstore and gives Flora the ghost more freedom to prod Tookie, and the killing of George Floyd, which brings a conflagration to Minneapolis. I wouldn't say I loved these parts of the book, mostly because the protests seem to bring a stop to the central plot of Flora's haunting, but given how cringey it might have been and how little I think most of us really want to read a book about this stuff, it seems remarkable that they work at all. Ultimately, Erdrich brings it all back together, and we come to understand that the injustice of Floyd's death, the violent reaction to the protests by the Minneapolis police, even the negligence that leads to COVID running rampant, these are all manifestations of the same specters that haunt our country, like Flora haunts the bookstore. And it doesn't sound as cheesy coming from Erdrich.

What really makes it work, though, is the voice of Tookie: brash, brazen, playful, and profound. The first thirty pages, which detail the madcap scheme that got Tookie sent to prison in the first place--a scheme involving a refrigerated truck and a dead body with cocaine taped beneath its armpits--are some of the best writing to come out of Erdrich's pen in many years. The Sentence can't sustain that momentum. Perhaps it's unsustainable, but it certainly establishes a great reserve of goodwill the novel draws from in its more tedious moments. In keeping with other Erdrich books, there are a few other plot threads I haven't mentioned, including Tookie's marriage to the tribal policeman who arrested her and her stepdaughter's new baby by a Canadian Metis man who may or may not be a wolf creature known as a Rougarou. It's that voice, lively and fresh, which brings all of these together and makes The Sentence worth reading. It's a book that understands that words have power.

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.