The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich

The sausages took him through Minneapolis and rolling prairie country into the sudden sweep of plains, vast sky, into North Dakota, where he sold the last link. He left the train and walked along the edge of a small town railroad platform. The town was a huddle of cheerful squat buildings, some framed with false half-story fronts on top of awnings and display windows, one or two of limestone and at least three of sturdy brick. Against the appalling flatness, the whole place looked defenseless and foolish, he thought, completely open to attack, and, with its back against the river, nowhere to flee. It looked to him like a temporary place, almost a camp, that one great storm or war could level. He read the sign Argus aloud and memorized the sound. He turned in a circle to get his bearings, brushed off his father's suit, assessed the fact that he'd arrived with thirty-five cents and a suitcase, now empty of sausages, that contained six knives, a sharpening steel, and graduated whetstones. There were streets of half-grown trees and solid-looking houses to the north. A new limestone bank building and a block of ornately bricked stores on the principle street stretched down to the east. The wind boomed around Fidelis with a vast indifference he found both unbearable and comforting.

He didn't know that he would never leave.

The Master Butchers Singing Club depicts Louise Erdrich's beloved North Dakota during the time period between two wars. Fidelis Waldvogel, a German who has recently married his dead comrade's wife and adopted her son, has made his way to this desolate spot by selling the sausages from his suitcase. The small town of Argus is as far as he can go--he was trying to get to Seattle, but he's run out of sausages--and he sets up shop as a butcher. Delphine Watzka is a local, the daughter of the town drunk, who returns to Argus after a brief stint as an acrobat with her boyfriend, Cyprian Lazarre. Cyprian is not-so-openly Ojibwe, and even less openly gay, a fact that Delphine learns by happenstance, and which shuts the door on the possibility of their marriage, even as the two share a great love and affection for one another. Delphine ends up as a shopgirl in the butcher shop, and eventually [spoiler alert] after the death of Fidelis' wife Eva, will become the wife to Fidelis and stepmother to Fidelis and Eva's several children. This is a long and slow process that, as the book shows, takes place over decades--nearly the entire twenty-five year period between the first and second World Wars.

What is interesting about The Master Butchers Singing Club is that, if you are a reader who is only familiar with Erdrich as a "Native American" writer, Native characters and issues exist only in the background. Only Cyprian is really Native, and he spends much of the novel away in Canada, funneling in alcohol during Prohibition. Instead, the novel depicts Erdrich's (note the paternal German name) North Dakota as a place of diversity and refuge: German Fidelis, Polish Delphine and her father Roy, and various others, mostly from Potato Europe. In this way it reminded me, though perhaps only superficially, of the novels of Willa Cather. When Fidelis arrives in Argus, it's hardly more than a "camp" on the plain that seems as if it's going to be blown away. The novel tracks the formation of a community in Argus that includes the Waldvogels as well as Natives like Cyprian and others, and emphasizes the resilience of those who, like the Waldvogels, end up in this inhospitable place looking for a kind of security and stability unavailable to them in the Old World. Although Delphine is the center of the novel, it has a disparateness to it that is strong even for Erdrich, as it follows the family's many sons through their own marriages and experiences in war--on both sides, as it turns out, of World War II.

One of the most interesting plot points in The Master Butchers Singing Club involves a horrible death: when Delphine returns to her father's house, she finds a set of bodies in the basement belonging to a married couple and their child. It seems that the family had come to a party at Roy's only to get locked in the basement; in his drunken state, perhaps he mistook their cries for help for voices in his head. (Was it an accident, or... MURDER?) There's an interesting echo of this later in the novel when one of Fidelis and Eva's sons, Markus, ends up swallowed up by the collapse of an earthen tunnel. Cyprian saves him with a feat of acrobatics, which soothes somewhat the rivalry between the two men for the attentions of Delphine. But I was interested in the way that the novel uses these two burials as an image of tragedy, which becomes buried, and perhaps even forgotten and ignored. Many things are buried in the novel, griefs and traumas, and when they are brought to light, as with the reveal of the bodies in the basement, they don't always provide healing.

Anyway. I think I like Erdrich a little better when she's in historical mode, and The Master Butchers Singing Club is no exception. While I don't quite think I'd call it one of her best--her most representative work always includes a kind of magical realism that's not present here--I found it really gripping and skillful.