Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands. Islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario and Minnesota has 14,000 islands. Some of them are painted islands, teh rocks bearing signs ranging from a few hundred to more than a thousand years old. So these islands, which I'm longing to read, are books in themselves. Then there is a special island on Rainy Lake that is home to thousands of rare books ranging from crumbling copies of Erasmus in the French and Heloise's letters to Abelard dated MDCCXXIII, to first editions of Mark Twain (signed) to a magnificent collection of ethnographic works on the Ojibwe that might explain the book-islands of Lake of the Woods.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country begins with author Louise Erdrich piling into a blue minivan with her newborn daughter, Kiizhik. This is an unconventional trip, and at 46 years of age, she's an unconventional mother. The destination is the lake country of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario, Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake, vast freshwater lakes that are dotted with islands, a place that is still home to the Ojibwe. Erdrich herself is a "plains" Ojibwe, from the eastern stretches of North Dakota, and so the place still retains some of its strangeness, but there's home here, too, not least because she is meeting the mysterious father of her infant, a medicine man named Tobasonakwut. (One reads between the lines to see that the pair are not quite a conventional couple; elsewhere I've read that he was a married man.) In these islands she sees something akin to the books that are her lifelong passion: numerous, inviting, mysterious, and even, in some cases as she explains above, legible.

What a precious object this book is for me. I picked it up at Erdrich's own Minneapolis bookstore, Birchbark Books, after a week of exploring the Ojibwe lands around Lake Superior. We never quite got up to where Erdrich describes in this book, but we did end up a stone's throw from Rainy Lake, at Lake Kabetogama, also now a part of Voyageurs National Park. But I recognized something, just a little, of the awe that suffuses that place, where the islands really do fan out and multiply in an impossible way. The book is just a book, it isn't even signed, but it lies at the crossroads of my own experiences and that of an author who has meant a lot to me. Maybe there's even a small touch of the numinous in the way of Erdrich's visit to the cabin of explorer and naturalist Ernest Oberholtzer, where she sleeps among his vast library, making herself known to his immense store of books.

Beyond that, I was really touched by this book. I've only read Erdrich's fiction, which can be fanciful and goofy, but reading her in this mode, a mix of memoir, naturalism, and travelogue, was really fascinating. She's always had a way of persuasively writing about the way that myth and magic appear in everyday life, and she manages to make the ancient stone glyphs of the Lake of the Woods seem as mysterious and meaningful as anything from Tracks or Bingo Palace. And I was struck by the gentle, strange relationship between herself and Tobasonakwut, as well as the late-coming child, who seems to have a natural attraction for the lake's animals: sturgeon, otters, moose. Even the principle metaphor of the book, which ought to be silly--a book is like an island--seems natural and persuasive in Erdrich's hands. I really enjoyed seeing this other side of a great writer.

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.

Northland by Porter Fox

At sunset, the sky turned dark blue. I tried to remember the color of the stones, the cool air, the auburn sunlight touching my forehead. I thought about the first day of the trip at West Quoddy Head in Maine and tried to memorize the dark spires, rounded massifs, and marshmallow flanks of Mount Baker's glaciers. I thought about all the parts of the northland--oceans, rivers, lakes, plains, cities, reservations, towns--and how they linked from east to west. It was indeed its own territory: a forgotten belt of wild, old America delineated by iron monuments, rock piles, and clear-cuts.

We ended our trip through the Pacific Northwest last week at the Peace Arch, a monument that stands on the border between the towns of Blaine, Washington and Douglas, British Columbia. A tall white arch stands in the middle of a green park that stretches between both countries, with the entry lines on either side of it, the Canadian to the left, the American to the right. The monument is supposed to be a monument to peace between the two countries; in the middle, there is a ceremonial gate attached to the wall below a sign that reads MAY THESE GATES NEVER BE CLOSED. Just beyond the arch, a sign on the Canadian side reads, "Park Closed."

We saw a woman enter idly from the Canadian side and walk to the American, where she was collected by an official looking man who might have been from either country and directed toward a booth, presumably to be sent off to a black site. A few feet away the park becomes a stretch of carefully tended flowers and picnic benches (and the Peace Arch Park Snack Shack) on the American side. On the Canadian side, the border follows a street where a row of houses look out in to America, their residents only needing to make a few steps out of their door to enter another country. These houses made the stern theater of the border crossing stations seem performative and silly.

Porter Fox ended his journey along all 4,000+ miles of the USA-Canadian border at the Peace Arch, too. By then, the peculiar logic that exists at the Peace Arch has appeared many times: the world's longest peaceful border has, since 9/11, become hardened in ways that have sundered communities and put an end to the free travel that was once common between the two countries. The "Park Closed" signs we saw were, no doubt, the vestiges of Canadian COVID-19 policy, which has hardened the border even more--in many places, trains still can't pass through it. But even a few years ago, when Fox took up the project of canoeing, hiking, boating, and driving from the border's eastern terminus in Maine to its western one in Washington, the border was increasingly contentious.

The thesis of Fox's book is that the area around the border has its own particular identity and existence, as a region he calls "The Northland." He wants to explore the Northland, a region that is, with some exceptions, remarkably rural and remote, and understand how the border has shaped this identity. He begins in Maine, canoeing along the St Croix river, then hitches a ride on a Great Lakes tanker that takes him all the way from Lake Erie to Lake Superior. From there, he drives across the oil-rich boomlands of North Dakota, making a quick and timely sojourn into the protest camps at Standing Rock, which are not really near the border--though the oil in the pipeline is. His journey continues along the "Medicine Line," as the Native Americans who were pushed across it in the 19th century call it, stopping in at the Blackfeet Reservation and through Glacier National Park. In the North Cascades, he sleeps in a fire tower, as Jack Kerouac once did, during one of his most prolific periods.

The book is part travelogue, part social commentary, part history. As Fox travels, he recounts the history of the border, which has always been a contentious one. The 18th and 19th century politicians who negotiated the border really had no idea about the geography of the land they were dividing, and time and time again, created impossible borders that would lead to more contention, and more need for tenacious explorers and surveyors. The creation of Minnesota's Northwest Angle, for instance, the little chopped-off bit on the other side of the Lake of the Woods, exists because the agreed border point--the headwaters of the Mississippi--is a hundred miles south of where the negotiators thought it was. Fox adds to this history a sympathetic portrait of Angle Inlet, the Angle's only community, where schools and businesses have closed over the last few decades because of the stubborn and increasing difficulty of crossing the border--twice. And similar stories are told in Maine and along the Great Lakes.

I appreciated Fox's focus on Native Americans, for whom the border takes on a special relevance. Fox's sojourn to Standing Rock fits uncomfortably with the book's overall thesis (I mean, Google it, it's mostly in South Dakota) but along with his stop at the Blackfeet Nation, it gives an effective portrait of the way the border was placed over the existence of tribal nations, and which has profoundly shaped their existence. Even before the Indian Wars of the 19th century, the border was an indigenous problem, as Fox explains in his recounting of the alliance between Jesuit explorer Champlain and the Hurons against the Iroquois.

We crossed the border four times on our trip: twice by airplane, once by boat, and once on the road. But we experienced only one small part of its four thousand miles. I loved reading Northland while on this trip because it gave me a sense of exploring something larger; not merely of stepping over an imaginary line but passing through a real place on which history works its considerable, sometimes transformative, sometimes brutal efficacy.

Solar Storms by Linda Hogan

People say that in the beginning was the word. But they have forgotten the loneliness of God, the yearning for something that shaped itself into the words, Let there be. Out of that loneliness, light was conceived, water opened across a new world, and people rose up from clay, there were dreamers of plants and deer. It was this same desire in me, this same longing for creation, and Bush's spare words were creation in itself. I had been empty space, and now I was finding a language, a story, to shape myself by. I had been alone and now there were others. I was suspended there on the island of snails and mosses, snow and windstorms, and I was quiet for days on end, but like Bush's wolverine bones, I was partaking of sacred meal and being put back together.

My Indijanuary continues with Linda Hogan's Solar Storms, a book about a young woman who moves in with her indigenous family on the Boundary Waters between Minnesota and Canada. Angel arrives with half her face scarred for reasons unknown, knowing only that it was her tempestuous mother who somehow afflicted her with them many years ago. Her mother is away in far northern Canada, but when she arrives at the Boundary Waters, she finds a whole family waiting for her: Bush, the former wife of her grandfather and adoptive mother, Agnes, her great-grandmother, and--get this--Dora-Rouge, her ancient and wheelchair-bound great-great-grandmother. Over and over, Angel describes the experience of returning to this place "moving toward herself," and in the company of these women she's able to recapture an identity rooted in her family, and the lands and waters that surround them.

There is a particular story I see again and again in these books by indigenous authors: an indigenous person, often of mixed heritage, must resolve a battered psyche by returning home and reconnecting with their family and homeland. It happens in Ceremony; it happens in A House Made of Dawn; it happens in Winter in the Blood; it happens to some extent in Joy Harjo's poetry collection An American Sunrise. What these stories know is that the psyche is not an independent actor, but one constrained by context; it cannot be healed except by being integrated into community and a relationship with the world. Furthermore, they know that individual traumas are the tail-end results of capitalism and commodification. The healing process always has a geographic character, one that goes in reverse, undoing diaspora, and maybe even reversing Indian removal. (Other books do this, too, like Song of Solomon, except that a return to a teleological homeland--Africa--can only be gestured toward at the end of that book.)

In Solar Storms, this movement-in-reverse carries Angel in several stages: first to the Boundary Waters, and then farther out onto the remote spit of land where Bush lives called Adam's Rib. There, Bush engages in a kind of literal healing, piecing together models of animal skeletons to be sold to museums. But soon the process carries her, along with Bush, Agnes, and Dora-Rouge, in a canoe up through the rivers of what seems to be Ontario, back toward the "Fat-Eaters" who are Dora-Rouge's--and thus Angel's--original community. (Hogan is careful to make the characters seem indigenous-ish, but never gives them a specific tribal identity. They're not Cree, not Ojibwe; as best I can tell the "Fat-Eaters" are totally made up. This gives the novel a sort of blurred spiritual nature I decline to evaluate.) Their goal is to take Dora-Rouge here so that she can die where she was born. It also happens to be where Angel's mother lives.

There's a too-easy version of this story, one I was dreading when I saw Barbara Kingsolver's blurb on the back of the book. But the return north is not easy or simple. Instead of heading toward healing, the trip leads the women into crisis. The rivers of the north are being dammed and diverted, one by one, threatening to obliterate towns by flooding, or drain the lakes that people have relied on for time immemorial. The damming threatens not only the tiny towns of the north, but Bush's house at Adam's Rib, which will be destroyed even though it's a two-week canoe ride away. (Appropriately, I was reading this part at the same time I came across this article describing Canada as a front for destructive resource extractors.) Angel and her forbears become embroiled in a desperate protest against the dams, and the personal becomes political. How can Angel be healed by a return to her ancestral community when the community itself is so existentially threatened? It's this question, perhaps, that makes the book so rich and so fraught, and distinguishes it from similar ones.

Angel's mother, too, is something of a bust, too spiteful and toxic to provide any kind of closure, though her daughter has traveled so far to find her. Her mother, Hannah, becomes a kind of twin to the forces of destruction that dam the rivers, a senseless and devouring force that no one has been able to contain. (We discover that Angel's scars are bite marks.) Strangely, Hannah's malice seems to come from a deeper, darker place than the evil of the river-dammers. It's a mystical, even supernatural evil, without rhyme or reason. Can Hannah heal by returning? Of course not--she's been there all along. Is her kind of evil worse, or scarier somehow, than the river-dammers'? Or is she a force of nature, an expression of its balance, that is equally endangered, like the legendary whirlpool at Adam's Rib that swallows drunks and skidoos?

Anyway, this book was a pleasant surprise. I set my expectations low because of the "healing company of women" stuff; that one's probably on me. But I was surprised by its complexity and its rejection of simple narratives. 

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.

Prudence by David Treuer

What could he say to any of them when nothing anyone could say could make time flow in the other direction: back from England to Florida to Texas; back east to Montgomery, and then straight north, following the Mississippi, a fat brown worm in Louisiana, as it shrank, shed tributaries, spit earth and trees back up on the banks, shed cities like a snake shaking of fleas, till the river ran clear and cool, weeds waving in the current, shallow enough for herons to wade along its edges in search of minnows; and Frankie touched down at the Pines. And then the shot would move back up the barrel of the shotgun and the gun would fall to his side, useless, ridiculous, silly, really, some silly toy his father bought to have in the house. And then Billy's hand would reach out to take it from him.

On a summer day at a northern Minnesota resort called the Pines, everyone is anxiously awaiting the arrival of Frankie, the owner's son, from Princeton: his mother Emma, the Ojibwe caretaker Felix, and especially Billy, the Ojibwe boy with whom Frankie has had an extended and clandestine summer affair. When Frankie arrives, he has several of his louchest Princeton buddies in tow, much to Billy's chagrin. Instead of falling into each other's arms, Billy and Frankie are whisked upon a mission of machismo, hoping to hunt down a German prisoner who has recently escaped from the prison camp across the river from the Pines. When Frankie shoots at a noise in the brush, he ends up killing not the German but a young girl running with her older sister from their Indian School in North Dakota to the Canadian border. This act of sudden violence forces the young lovers apart and splinters the lives of everyone involved: Frankie, Billy, Felix, and especially Prudence, the sister left alive.

This is the first fiction book I've read by Treuer, who wrote Native American Fiction: A User's Manual and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. As one might expect, Treuer's evocation of Ojibwe life is particularly rich and complex; his depiction of Felix, Billy, and others shows how enmeshed the lives of whites and indigenous people in northern Minnesota are. Themes of indigeneity are there, and powerful--the school that Prudence and her sister Grace escape, for one, and the comparative poverty of Felix's status compared to the resort where he is caretaker--but they feel naturalistic and unforced. One gets to understand the way race and settler colonialism can exist on a plane just beneath the dynamics of the moment: Billy and Frankie's hidden love, or the mounting hysteria of World War II.

Now, I'm a sucker for the story that goes "A sudden act of surprising violence changes everything." But the two thirds of Prudence that follow the killing felt misshaping and disappointing, to me. Billy takes credit for the shot to save Frankie--not that anyone much notices or cares, with the war going on, that an indigenous girl has been killed--and the two are sundered. Frankie goes off to train as a bombardier (these sections are so meticulously rendered they made me wonder if they are drawn from experience!), desperate for the war to distract him from his guilt and longing for Billy. Prudence sticks around, growing up to be a depressed drunk who turns to sex to assuage her grief. Believing Billy to be her sister's killer, she treasures the idea that Frankie will come back to marry her--a promise made, obviously, from guilt. Prudence's ironic and mistaken attachment to Frankie is one of the novel's most interesting elements, but the novel struggles to develop it, as it does Prudence herself. Another plotline, in which a European Jew arrives in Minnesota to hunt down a Nazi from the camp seems like it will connect, but never does, not in a meaningful way.

All of that's to say that Prudence has some terrific, arresting parts. But as a whole, it seems to lack a center: is this a story about Frankie, or Billy, or Prudence? The novel's heart, actually, seems to be--or perhaps ought to have been--Felix, the kind and studious caretaker whose grief from the previous world war provides the tragic backdrop to the modern story. In a novel about the way that grief and guilt destroy, a man who turns his grief into a quiet but steady living really stands out.

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

He had been night watchman for seven months. In the beginning, his post as chairman of the Turtle Mountain Advisory Committee could be dealt with in the late afternoons and evenings. He'd been able to sleep most mornings after his shift. When lucky, like tonight, he even grabbed an additional catnap before driving to work. But every so often the government remembered the Indians. And when they did, they always tried to solve Indians, thought Thomas. They solve us by getting rid of us. And do they tell us when they plan to get rid of us? Ha and ha. He had received no word from the government. By reading the Minot Daily News, he'd found out something was up. Then Moses had to pry the papers out of his contact down in Aberdeen. It had taken precious time to even get confirmation, or see the actual House Resolution stating, as its author said, that the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa was targeted by the United States Congress for emancipation. E-man-ci-pation. Eman-cipaton. The word would not stop banging around in his head. Emancipated. But they were not enslaved. Freed from being Indians was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas's father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. So as usual, by getting rid of us, the Indian problem would be solved.

Overnight the tribal chairman job had turned into a struggle to remain a problem. To not be solved.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at a jewel bearing plant on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. His name means muskrat, the humble creature who, in Ojibwe myth, descended to the bottom of the waters that covered the world at its birth and retrieved a bit of earth when no other animal could. As night watchman, and as the reservation's part-time chairman--a thankless and unpaid role--Thomas is like his namesake, doing the unseen work that maintains the reservation and its residents. Thomas is about to face his, and the reservation's, greatest challenge in decades: termination.

In his history book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer describes the Termination era as one of the epochs of Indian history after the Wounded Knee Massacre. It comes after the boarding school era, in which Indian children were forced to attend assimilationist schools that would expunge the Indian from them, and termination, too, is a kind of erasure: it would dissolve the reservation completely, forfeiting the responsibility for the land and its people to the state rather than the federal government, and relocating many of its impoverished residents to large cities. Termination, like so much shitty conservative policy today, was justified by arguments about self-reliance. "You learn to walk by walking," a pro-termination Senator tells Thomas on the Senate floor. Thomas thinks: "We didn't get to the Turtle Mountains by riding in a covered wagon." The hard work of countering termination--persuading the residents it's a bad idea, making petitions, commissioning studies--is Thomas' version of descending to the bottom of the waters of the world.

Though he's the title character, Thomas' story is often overshadowed by that of Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau, his niece and an employee at the jewel bearing plant. Patrice, dogged and determined, is worried about her sister Vera, who has disappeared into Minneapolis among pimps and addicts. On a trip to find her, it looks for a moment as if Patrice may follow into her footsteps, impulsively taking a job as an erotic dancer in a lumberjack-themed bar, where she's dressed as Babe the Blue Ox. (It's weird.) Vera's disappearance, and the threat to Patrice, are like sirens warning against what might happen if termination is allowed to go through: forced relocation to the city, to addiction, to crime, to dissolution. Returning home, Patrice's story becomes about her difficulty managing several suitors, including a charismatic Ojibwe boxer and a clueless white math teacher--but I didn't think these storylines had nearly as much energy or cleverness as her odyssey in the city, which ends, I felt, much too soon.

It's touching to know that Thomas is based on Erdrich's grandfather, who really was the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, and who really did spearhead the campaign--a successful campaign--to save Turtle Mountain from termination. But it's Patrice who interests Erdrich most, I think, the headstrong young woman who is on the precipice of deciding who she is and what she wants. How could someone like Patrice do something like that, torn from the community in which she was born, where she knows the names and uses of the plants, where she lives with her mother by the "old ways," where she can sleep in a cave alongside a hibernating bear, where she can see the spirits of her ancestors as the Northern Lights in the sky? Thomas might be the novel's heart, but Patrice represents its stakes.

Erdrich's early novels and stories are interconnected, featuring a huge cast that appears and reappears from different angles in a way that make you feel as if you are deepening your understanding of them the more books you read. Her later work, like this novel and the two before it, LaRose and The Future Home of the Living God, seem like attempts to reproduce the breadth of those early books with fresh faces. Though it doesn't always work, and never as persuasively as in Tracks or The Bingo Palace, The Night Watchman is probably the most successful of these attempts. I hope she'll consider writing more about Patrice and Thomas, the humble muskrat.

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

The next morning, I travel the highway north to my Potts reservation home.  I'm having flashes of poignancy.  Everything that I am seeing--the pines, the maples, the roadside malls, insurance companies and tattoo joints, the ditch weeds and the people in the houses--is all physically balanced on the cusp between the now of things and the big, incomprehensible change to come.  And yet nothing seems terribly unusual.  A bit quiet, perhaps, and some sermons advertised on church billboards are more alarming than usual.  Endtime at Last!  Are You Ready to Rapture?  In one enormous, empty field a sign is planted that reads Future Home of the Living God.

It's just a bare field, fallow and weedy, stretching to the pale horizon.


Cedar Songmaker has always known that she was adopted from an Ojibwe family living on a northern Minnesota reservation.  The name, ironically, is not Native at all: it's given to her by her hippieish liberal Minneapolis parents, Sera and Glen.  When we see her for the first time, she's headed to meet her birth mother for the first time, and her birth name turns out to be the much more anodyne "Mary Potts."

It's one of Erdrich's little ironies in a book that has too few of them.  The situation she's set up for herself doesn't lend itself much to irony: evolution, we are told, has begun running backwards.  Sabertooth tigers and archeopteryxes can be found in the yard, chickens are turning back into lizards, human reproduction has become a fraught, dwindling affair.  Cedar, who is pregnant, travels to the reservation to ask about her genetics, not anticipating that her genetics, and her pregnancy, are about to become matters of state interest.  Uncertainty begets violence and violence begets political change; soon an autocratic fundamentalist state is tracking down pregnant women and incarcerating them to maintain control over the precious resource that is the uterus.  Cedar spends the novel evading capture, getting captured, and trying to break free with the help of both her white and Ojibwe families.

The setup sounds so similar to The Handmaid's Tale it makes you wonder what Erdrich felt that Atwood didn't get right the first time around.  Part of the answer might be found in faith: while both novels feature fundamentalist states, Erdrich's protagonist is a committed Catholic convert who even serves as editor of a religious magazine called Zeal.  Visions of Kateri Tekakwitha, the first and only Native American saint, serve as a significant motif, and the novel is scattered with passages from Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Merton.  It seems strange, actually, next to the lampooned Catholic sourpusses of Erdrich's novels, but the sincerity of Cedar's religion is clearly meant as a counterweight to the shallow opportunism of the state.  Cedar's Ojibwe family, too, turn out to be Catholics.

Of course, there's the Native element too, elbowing in on Atwood.  Such themes seem less present here than in Erdrich's other novels.  But I am considering including this novel in a class I am preparing about contemporary Native literature, and I think it would be a real masterstroke to pair Erdrich's Native future with a novel about the Native past, like James Welch's Fools Crow.  So let me talk myself into it a little: David Treuer's long background chapter in his history Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, which covers thousands of years of Native history before 1890, is titled "Narrating the Apocalypse."  Erdrich is keenly aware that the fantasies of dispossession, death, and diminution that keep our eyes on dystopian fiction have already been visited on the Native people of America.  "Indians have been adapting since before 1492," Cedar's newfound stepfather Eddy tells her, "so I guess we'll keep adapting":

"But the world is going to pieces."

"It is always going to pieces."

"This is different."

"It is always different.  We'll adapt."

The crisis of genetics and reproduction, too, has special implications for Native people.  There are laws, Cedar reminds us (because her parents seem to have flouted them), preventing white families from adopting Native children.  What Cedar is asked to imagine is the end of a bloodline that goes back in this country much, much longer than other folks', but for which the end is a much more conceivable possibility.  When Cedar reflects on the way that time, through pregnancy, becomes incarnate in her, it resonates with a different and deeper frequency.  And as it turns out, the apocalypse turns out to be a kind of opportunity for the Ojibwe, who find themselves able to reclaim the land, recently evacuated, that was lost to them in the process of allotment.  What might a collapse of American institutions, American history, and a return to the past, mean for Native America?

Eddy is a really delightful character.  He shares with Cedar pages from his 3,000-plus page book, still being composed, in which he enumerates reasons not to commit suicide.  These pages are often the best part of Future Home, because they seem borrowed from the Erdrich of Love Medicine, who loved holy fools.  He alone has a kind of loving satire that the book sorely needs.  It contains flashes of lovely weirdness: the archeopteryx, the intrusive face of a Big Brother-type on Cedar's computer screen who calls herself "Mother," her Ojibwe grandmother's story about having sex, in dreams, with the devil.  But those moments are too few and far between.  (Supposedly Erdrich cut nearly 200 pages from the manuscript--it makes you wonder if these flashes were once lightning storms.)  Instead, too much is given to the rote plodding of capture and escape, the recycled Atwoodisms.  It has the sort of dispiriting air of Erdrich, tired after three decades of being so uniquely herself, trying to be someone else, and being perhaps a little too successful.