A shot resounds

The Plague of Doves A Novel - Louise Erdrich

April 27, 2008|Brigitte Frase

It has been difficult to come back from this novel to the familiar atmosphere of
my daily life. I have been through this before with Louise Erdrich, who weaves
exotic and erotic spells with her writing. She gets better and better. If her first
book, "Love Medicine," was a concerto, then ever since "The Last Report on the
Miracles at Little No Horse," she has been composing symphonies filled with a
complex wisdom about the strands of darkness and light that make up a human
life.

"The Plague of Doves" is a multi-generational novel-in-stories of the intertwined

lives of the whites in the town of Pluto, N.D., and the Native Americans and
mixed-blood Metis people of French ancestry who live on the reservation
surrounding it. Moving back and forth in time, four narrators take turns
uncovering layer after layer of past and present.

The novel opens with a shotgun blast that will reverberate through all their lives
and connect them in breathtaking, sometimes shocking ways. When the first
narrator, Evelina, talks with her grandfather, Mooshum, about her fascination
with her teacher, Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, he twists his mouth at the sound
of her name. He has always regaled Evelina and her brother with stories of his
past adventures, which change with each telling. But the story he tells now is a
grim one, and Erdrich does not spare them (or us) from visualizing in detail a
horrible crime.

In 1911, two Indian teenagers, Mooshum and Paul Holy Track, along with Paul's
guardian Asiginak, come across the bodies of a murdered farm family and
tragically become the prime suspects. The three are strung up on an oak tree, but
Mooshum is inexplicably cut down, the only survivor. We won't find out until
much later the significant detail he has omitted from the story.

The next narrator, Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who will marry Evelina's aunt,
talks about his grandfather Joseph, who joined the town-site expedition that
resulted in Pluto. The two Metis guides saved his life. Their younger brother
Cuthbert will be one of the lynching victims, and a descendant, Billy Peace, will
marry Marn Wolde and found a cult on her father's farm, the site of that killing
tree. Marn narrates the story of her marriage and how, with the aid of the snakes
she handles, she escapes from the commune with her children. In synopsis, the
plot lines seem operatic, but Erdrich's artistry and passion had me believing
every word. Evelina returns as a university student with dreams of going to
France. A bad drug trip, thanks to her dealer cousin Corwin Peace, and the
unbearable experience of falling in love with a girl, only to be abandoned, sends
her into a total breakdown. We are so deeply inside Evelina that we feel her sick
despair, to the point of claustrophobia. The last narrator, Dr. Cordelia Lochren,
sends us back to that farm family, whose killer was never identified, until she
adds up a few things that happened in her practice and realizes who it was.
Erdrich moves seamlessly from grief to sexual ecstasy, from comedy (Mooshum's
proof of the nonexistence of hell is priceless) to tragedy, from richly layered
observations of nature and human nature to magical realism. She is less
storyteller than medium. One has the sense that voices and events pour into her
and reemerge with crackling intensity, as keening music trembling between
sorrow and joy. Here, for example, is Mooshum's brother Shamengwa playing the
violin. Judge Antone is stirred to the marrow: "The sound connected instantly
with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge
that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our
terrors, too. . . . Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also
surprising pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something
shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence."

There are a number of powerful scenes that, poised on the threshold between
dream or premonition and reality, remind me of the equally double-natured
light- and shadow-play of Akira Kurosawa's film "Dreams." In one, Judge Antone
sells his family home to Ted Bursap, a developer, in large part to break free from
Bursap's wife, with whom he's had an all-consuming affair since he was a
teenager. When the backhoe tears down a wall, a deadly cloud of bees emerges
and attacks Ted. Antone, calmly watching, removes a piece of honeycomb from
the claw of the machine and stuffs it into his mouth, tasting the honey while his
lover looks on in horror.

This scene, near the end of the book, recalls the plague of doves Mooshum saw in
his childhood, when great dark flocks of them descended on the fields and
destroyed the crops. The dove, a symbol of life, becomes a pestilence; the bee,
symbol of friendly industriousness and domestic virtue, turns into a killer. In
Erdrich's world, life and death hold each other close. Erdrich understands the
potency of stories. Mooshum tells of a time when a story about hunger escaped
from the teller and terrorized the countryside. After her first kiss, Evelina sadly
thinks, "I had expected to feel joy but instead felt a confusion of sorrow, or
maybe fear, for it seemed that my life was a hungry story and I its source. . . . I
had now begun to deliver myself into the words." Later in life, at Judge Antone's
wedding, she realizes, "[w]hen we are young, the words are scattered all around
us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence. . . .
"*