Over the next seven years, from 2004–2010, Erdrich wrote and published seven books, an average of one per year, not quite her record of three in one year, but still enough to turn other writers green with envy. The seven that she published were in three different genres: two more children’s books, four more novels, and a collection of short stories.
Her writing consumed much of her time, but little is known of what else she did. Knowing her devotion to her children, much of her personal time must have been spent in tending to the needs of her youngest daughter, Kiizhikhok. Her other daughters were reaching for their own separate skies, but she encouraged them, supported them, and talked to them often on the telephone and in person. The oldest daughter, Persia, worked at the Birchbark Book Store, where Erdrich called in every day, if she did not actually appear in person. She has spoken often about the difficulty of learning the Ojibwe language of her mother, and her determination to persist, so she may have continued with that study during this period of her life. There would have been visits to Kiizhikok’s father, visits to her parents, her brothers and sisters and their families at holidays and other times that were not necessarily holidays or marking family anniversaries, but just because she wanted that family connection. Bits of information about her writing and her life besides the writing leaked out here and there in interviews she gave at book signings and other events as each of her books were released by the publishers.
Four Souls1 was the next book after The Master Butcher’s Singing Club, the first of the seven in seven years. This book answers questions raised about what happened to the enigmatic character of Fleur at the end of Tracks, published back in 1988. Fleur Pillager, beautiful and strong, had struggled against all odds to preserve her land from being taken over by an unscrupulous timber baron, but when she failed, she loaded the grave markers of her family into a wheelbarrow and pushed it off, not into the sunset, but into the sunrise. Other novels, such as Love Medicine, offer glimpses of Fleur as an older woman returned to her home territory, living semi-wild and reclusive, but readers wondered about what happened in those in-between years.
Four Souls tells the story of Fleur in believable action as she travels to Minneapolis to seek vengeance upon the timber baron, John James Mauser, who stole her land. She takes a job as a laundress for Mauser’s sister-in-law, manipulates her way into the Mauser family, and eventually marries the man that she despises and bears him an autistic child. While autism is not the same as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, raising a special needs child is always difficult no matter what the diagnosis. It is easy to surmise that Erdrich’s own experience of raising her three adopted special needs children must have influenced the characterization of the child in this novel. Erdrich’s fans, including this author, were delighted to learn more details of Fleur Pillager’s life, but for others who had not read Tracks, the plot and the character of Fleur may have seemed inaccessible. Publishers Weekly wrote:
The themes of revenge and redemption are strong here, especially when combined with the pull of her lyrical prose; Erdrich may not ensnare many new readers, but she will certainly satisfy her already significant audience.2
This book, like Tracks, has multiple narrators who sometimes contradict each other in their telling of Fleur’s story. Erdrich again keeps the character of Fleur enigmatic and distant by never letting Fleur tell her own story. Readers never know what Fleur truly thinks or believes about anything nor what she is planning to do next, they only know what others think of Fleur and her actions. In Four Souls, the narrators are Nanapush, one of the two narrators from Tracks, now a tribal official, and Margaret Kashpaw, Nanapush’s wife who is now a strong woman in her own right. A third narrator is Polly, the unmarried sister-in-law of Mauser.
While the book is indeed about revenge and the price that must be paid for it, it is also full of humor and comic asides, as would be expected from the trickster figure of Nanapush. In her review of the novel, Carole Goldberg states that although revenge is the theme of the novel, the cost is high, particularly for Fleur. Nanapush, too, seeks revenge at great risk. Goldberg continues with, “Another author might have exhausted her material long ago,”3 but insists that the characters Erdrich has created continue to delight her readers.
“Inexhaustible” could very well be an adjective used to describe Erdrich herself. In 2005, she published The Game of Silence, which continues the children’s story she began with the publication of The Birchbark House. The main character in both is Omakayas, an Ojibwe word meaning “little frog.” Erdrich also illustrated this one herself with pencil drawings that must have delighted her to draw. The back of the book contains additional material—a map of Omakayas’s adventures during the game of silence as well as a family tree for the character. Extra pages tell young (and old!) readers how to create their own family tree. This was undoubtedly created by Erdrich herself and not someone at the publishing house because the directions, especially the last paragraph, are so clearly in her own voice. She wrote, “Have fun! This is your chance to discover how everyone is related and teach the rest of your family about their own history.”4 Those words “everyone is related” are typical of native philosophy in the Upper Great Plains and elsewhere in the United States. Many native speeches and writings from tribes of the region end with the words, Mitakuye Oyasin, almost an invocation, a prayer that the preceding words will bring honor rather than shame upon the speaker or author’s family. The words are Lakota (Sioux) rather than Ojibwe in origin, but commonly used by other tribes. The exact translation is something like “all my relations,” but the meaning is that we are all related, and should be respectful of each other as if we were family.
Within the dedication, inside back cover notes, and a personal letter to the readers, Erdrich offers tiny glimpses into her personal life. The book is dedicated to her third daughter, Aza, who had been included in group dedications to her children before, but never one just for her. With daughter Persia actively involved in her mother’s life through the bookstore, and youngest daughter Kiizhikok needing so much attention, perhaps Erdrich felt that she needed to pay special tribute to one of her middle children.
The letter to the reader brings to mind the letters that Ralph Erdrich wrote to his daughter at Dartmouth, but for a younger reader. It is newsy and witty and fun. It reads in part,
I began writing The Game of Silence while I was still writing The Birchbark House, on Madeline Island in Lake Superior where my Ojibwe family originated long ago. . . . I pick mushrooms, explode puffballs, fall asleep next to my dog, and remember how difficult it was to remain quiet as a child.5
The reader is also given information about the little drawings throughout the book. Erdrich drew them from photographs of her children and her animals. She wrote,
. . . my children have posed at various ages for photographs that I now keep catalogued in shoeboxes. The objects pictured are pieces from my own collection of traditionally made Ojibwe baskets and moccasins.6
The “Meet Louise Erdrich” page in the back of the book gives very personal details that a child as well as an adult fan would love to know. The interviewer writes that Erdrich and her family have “a very new dog, a very strange cat—both pitch black—and a garden devoted to rhubarb . . .” and that the stories of Omakayas were “inspired when Ms. Erdrich and her mother, Rita Gourneau Erdrich, were researching their own family history.” This section goes on to state that “Ms. Erdrich is planning to write seven more books about Omakayas and her family, and the stories will span a hundred years of history.”7 Why seven more books? As mentioned earlier, Erdrich’s children’s series has been compared to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books of which there are nine. If Erdrich does complete and publish seven more, the total number of her children’s books would equal in number those of Wilder, and that may be her goal—to meet or exceed the number of books that Wilder wrote. In the interview section at the back of the book, Erdrich reveals that she has started the third book in the series, Twelve Moons Running. She offers nothing of the plot line, but ends the response to the question with, “I’d like to tell you more, but I have to write it first.”8
Finally, the back pages of The Game of Silence include a photo of Erdrich with her dog, Cola. In Spanish, the word “cola” means tail, while in Lakota, a similar word means friend, and both are appropriate names for a beloved pet. The caption beneath the photo reads,
Here I am with my old pal Cola, fiercely goofy, lovable, and also stubborn like me. I wanted my picture taken with him because he is seventeen and he is the inspiration for the dog in The Game of Silence.9
The photo is a head shot of Erdrich and Cola with Erdrich smiling pleasantly, the dog soulfully interested, both looking directly into the camera. In this one children’s book, Erdrich reveals more of herself than she does in any three or four interviews, and a good deal more than she ever puts into her adult works, but that should not be surprising. She reveals what she wants known about herself at times and places of her own choosing. Like Fleur, she is a strong woman, but enigmatic, but that she should be most open with children is fitting. She is most open and frank when writing or talking about childbirth, raising children, and in conversations with children. Strangely, where many people are queasily uncomfortable talking about sex, and writers often find sex scenes difficult to write (how to make them seem real without descending into purple prose or making them so poetically obscure as to make the reader wonder if a sex act took place at all), Erdrich writes such scenes with grace and dignity and complete believability. There is no hesitation. In conversational interviews, Erdrich does not belabor the topic, but neither does she shy from it. Odd that the area most people would find uncomfortable does not seem to dismay her, but she is reluctant to reveal other mundane matters of her own life.
The sex scenes in her next novel, The Painted Drum, released in 2005, are classic Erdrich—frank and realistic, yet poetic and beautiful. The main character, Faye Travers, whose heritage is Euro-American and Ojibwe, like Erdrich, carries on an affair with a widowed sculptor who lives nearby. She is drawn to him as a person and for sex, of course, but she is riddled with guilt as well. She is afraid, it would seem, that she does not deserve to love and be loved because she believes she is responsible for her sister’s death many years earlier. In this book, at least for some of the settings of the story, Erdrich draws upon her own experience of living both in New Hampshire and in the Ojibwe country of Minnesota and North Dakota. The title of the book comes from a drum that Faye, an estate sales agent, discovers among the possessions of a New Hampshire man who plundered native artifacts for his own personal interest. Faye steals the drum and returns it to the drum maker’s descendants and in so doing rediscovers her own native heritage. As Erdrich is wont to do, there are two narrators here. One is Faye and the other is the descendant of the drum maker, Bernard Shaawano, who tells the story of how the drum came to be made.
Drums are an important aspect of Ojibwe cultural practice. Erdrich has grounded so many of her novels in the Ojibwe culture, it was probably inevitable that she would eventually incorporate the drum into the plot of one of her novels. She wrote about ceremonial belief and practice in connection with death often, as in the opening section of Tracks, and about the role of the mythological figure of the windigo in Tracks and The Antelope Wife, among other books. The power of the drum to revive and release destructive memory and to heal is at the center of the plot in The Painted Drum. The characters, though, are classic Erdrich. The main character of Faye is another strong woman, if not so self-confident and assured as Fleur or Margaret in Tracks. Some critics and readers think that Erdrich has not created equally strong and sympathetic men characters, and that view has some validity. Consider, for instance, the self-centered and needy Richard Whiteheart Beads in The Antelope Wife, the sneaky, underhanded behavior of Nector in Tracks, and the opportunistic, amoral Lyman Lammartine in The Bingo Palace. Asked about this seeming preference for strong female characters in an interview for the Oakland Tribune, Erdrich says that some [of the male characters] have not been “the most delightful” but that creating Bernard [Shawaano] for The Painted Drum was a different experience. “He is one of the wisest male characters I’ve ever written. I have a soft spot for the men in this book.”10
Other readers might disagree about whether Bernard as the strongest male character, arguing instead that one of the strongest characters—male or female—that Erdrich ever created is that of Nanapush in Tracks, Four Souls, and other novels. He is a wise, grandfatherly figure, but tricksy and full of humor and human failings. Erdrich had strong male figures in her own life in the person of her brothers, her father Ralph, and her two grandfathers. On creating characters in general, she says,
Sometimes I’ve no idea where their motivations and actions come from. I’ve no idea whether to attribute them to an unknown part of myself or something bigger outside myself, of if I’m like a wanderer in the woods, stumbling into their world . . . They become part of my waking thoughts, and I return to them when I’m doing something else. But they don’t take me over.11
This novel revisits familiar places in Ojibwe country from her other books as well as New Hampshire, which is a new setting for Erdrich’s work. Of course, The Painted Drum is about relationships—that of Faye to her mother, from whom she seeks forgiveness over the death of her sister, and of Faye to her lover. National Public Radio interviewer Martha Woodruff remarked that it is difficult to think of “relationship” without thinking about the Erdrich–Dorris connection, a public closeness that Woodruff claims Erdrich says she “fostered in part to atone for her devotion to her art.” Woodruff asked if Erdrich missed his [Dorris’s] input in her writing life (his editing), and after a long silence, Erdrich responds with,
Well, as a—you know, I said something about trying to get at the truth as a writer, and I’ll try it as a person, too. No, I don’t. And it kind of makes my heart jump a little to say that, but no, I don’t miss it.12
After his death, Erdrich had been reluctant to speak out about the part of Dorris in her life, unwilling to raise those old ghosts, unwilling to open old wounds, unwilling to risk criticism from their mutual friends and acquaintances, and perhaps, in the Ojibwe way, unwilling to mention the name of the dead at all. Erdrich had finally come to a place where she could be honest. She had proven her ability to write without him, protected and nurtured their children, and gotten on with living. But she did not speak his name, or if she did, the interviewer did not record it.
There would be no new books—no poetry, no nonfiction, no novels—for more than two years, a negligible stretch of time for any other author, but an infinity for Erdrich. Such a lapse between publications had happened earlier in her career, from 1984–1986, and again from 1996–1998, but the 1984–1986 gap was when she had borne two daughters and was caring for her three adopted children as well as dealing with the egocentric behavior of Dorris. The second gap was during her separation from Dorris and his subsequent death. There seemed to be no major trauma or work-load issue for her in the period of 2005–2008. It was simply a time for rest and regrouping and for finishing the children’s book, The Game of Silence, rather than writing the more work-intensive novels. She had been writing almost unremittingly for more than 20 years. Now, she was economically secure, her three eldest daughters were on their way to making lives of their own, and the youngest was in school and beyond needing constant attention and care. There is no public information about her relationship with Tobasonakwuk other than what Erdrich revealed in Books and Islands, but whatever happened for good or ill, she would keep it to herself after living her last marriage and its fatal ending under the microscope of public attention.
No doubt, she wrote, but most likely on several projects at once, so that no one of them came to fruition quickly. However, two projects did reach publication in 2008: another novel, The Plague of Doves, and another children’s book, The Porcupine Year.
For The Plague of Doves, Erdrich followed her long-established practice of taking previously written short stories, writing new short stories, and then weaving them in their entirety or in bits into a novel. One original story for this novel, “Satan: Highjacker of a Planet,” dates back 10 years to its first publication in The Atlantic Monthly, and was reprinted in Prize Stories 1998. Other parts of the novel appeared as short stories from 2005–2007 in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and North Dakota Quarterly and were reprinted in The O.Henry Prize Stories, and in yearly editions of The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Mystery Stories.
The Plague of Doves has no dedication page. After publishing and writing dedications for 21 books of creative nonfiction, poetry, and novels, it would seem she has honored almost everyone. On an unlabeled page at the end of the book, however, she does issue “thank yous” to her editors and four other people whose identities beyond the names are not disclosed.
Erdrich’s fertile imagination takes wing within the plot of this book—her eye for the quirkiness of human behavior as well as the mundane and her penchant for extrapolating upon Ojibwe history and culture. The story is based upon a real event: the hanging of a 13-year-old boy, Paul Holy Track, by a mob in Emmons County, North Dakota. Another historical character in the book, Louis Riel, was a Métis resistance leader against the Canadian government in the late 19th century. The other characters are uniquely Erdrich, but familiar to her readers, if not as the same characters from her previous novels, but as representative of the kinds of people she imagines into life.
The book garnered her the usual starred reviews13 from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. A newspaper from her old haunt in New Hampshire, the Concord Monitor included this in its review of the book,
The Plague of Doves, her 11th novel, is yet another of her superb enchantments . . . Since the publication of her first book, Love Medicine, and her subsequent sagas of Plains people, Erdrich has demonstrated a rare ability to create vibrant, wholly original characters and to describe nature in prose so lyrical it becomes poetry. The Plague of Doves is proof that she has yet to exhaust her powerful magic.14
Almost, but not quite magic, the book was a finalist for the greatest prize in American letters—The Pulitzer, but was not the winner.
Nor had she exhausted her powerful magic in the realm of children’s literature, either. The Porcupine Year, the third book in the Omakayas series, came out in 2008 and earned starred reviews from Kirkus, Kliatt, School Library Journal, and Booklist. The previous book in this series, The Game of Silence, won the prestigious Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, which probably generated interest for this new one.15
This book, like The Plague of Doves, does not have a dedication page, and most of the end material is repeated from information published in The Game of Silence, although the specific information for creating a family tree has been shortened into a narrative without the accompanying graphic illustrations. Some information has been added to the end material, specifically a paragraph on storytelling and another on “cool crafts,” but the latter is just a list without specific how-to details. This book, too, is illustrated with drawings in Erdrich’s style, although there is no information as to whether she actually drew these herself or whether someone else created them. The third in the series of nine that she has set for herself, Chickadee, was published in August 2012. This book continues the saga of Omakayas through the perspective of her sons. The book that most clearly defines Erdrich’s talent and her writing style would not be published until 2009. The Red Convertible contains almost 500 pages of her short stories, 36 stories to be exact, of which 26 were previously published and 10 were new. Reading through this book is like visiting all the days of her life from childhood to middle age, like seeing all the seeds that were valuable in their own right as tiny perfect bits of nature, and recognizing in these stories the seeds that grew into the mighty trees of the novels. Here are all the characters that populate her work, the settings in Ojibwe country, the mythology, the comedy, and the pathos. A review of the book for the Minneapolis Tribune states,
Nearly every novel Louise Erdrich has published began life as a short story. “I am certain that I have come to the end,” she explains in the preface to “The Red Convertible,” her collection of fabulously sexy and selected tales. “But the stories are rarely finished with me. They gather force and weight and complexity,” and then—presumably—they take flight.16
There are more starred reviews, including one from Publishers Weekly; all are unanimous in praising this book as well as the body of Erdrich’s work. Some critics consider this an introduction to her work for those who have never read her before, and most of them recommend the book as a reminder of the great novels she produced using these stories as take-off points. However, for some readers, this book might be the Cliff’s Notes on Erdrich, and after having read this, they might see no point in reading her extended repertoire. Most of the reviewer’s compliments are reserved for the previously published stories, not the newer ones, and one reviewer takes aim at the newest stories as not being up to the usual Erdrich quality. Charles May wrote,
The more recent stories are somewhat less compelling . . . and when she leaves her mysterious American Indians . . . Erdrich, from whom we have come to expect the extraordinary, just seems ordinary. . . . Still this is a book worth reading, if for no other reason than to have some of the best parts of Erdrich’s earlier work gathered together in one place.17
Although the reviewers do not say so exactly, it would seem that many of them view this work as Erdrich’s Greatest Hits, which is not a negative reaction. Greatest Hits CDs for musicians often sell far more copies than their other CDs that might have had one to three good songs on each. From a commercial point of view, The Red Convertible was certainly successful.
Such a collection, whether selected works of a writer or the songs of a musician, is often viewed as the summing-up of a career and an assumption that the career is on the back end and winding down. For Erdrich, perhaps the trajectory has not yet reached the high point.
1. Louise Erdrich, Four Souls (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
2. Andrew Wiley, Agent, Publishers Weekly, July 2, 2004.
3. Carole Goldberg, “From Louise Erdrich’s Great Plains, a tale of revenge,” Hartford Courant, July 7, 2004.
4. Louise Erdrich, The Game of Silence (New York: HarperTrophy, an imprint of HarperCollins, 2005), 15.
5. Erdrich, The Game of Silence, 3.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 5.
8. Ibid., 7.
9. Photo by Anne Marsden, The Game of Silence, 4.
10. Diane Weddington, “Author Louise Erdrich says creating characters can be painful,” Oakland Tribune, October 4, 2005.
11. Ibid.
12. Martha Woodruff, “Profile: Louise Erdrich and the ‘Painted Drum,’ ” National Public Radio, NPR Weekend Edition, October 2, 2005.
13. Publications that review books as their main thrust of their periodicals, such as Publishers Weekly and Booklist, offer the “starred review” to books that they deem particularly outstanding. Most of Erdrich’s books have earned these honors, even those that have been criticized by the same publication that issued the starred review. It would seem that starring any book she publishes has become almost automatic.
14. Carole Goldberg, “Another enchantment from Louise Erdrich: Powerful novels[sic] spans 100 years on Plains,” Concord Monitor, May 11, 2008.
15. The Scott O’Dell Award was established in 1982. It awards $5,000 for a meritorious book published in the previous year for a children or young adults.
16. John Freeman, “Raw Power; Short Stories: Thirty years of short fiction by Minnesota author Louise Erdrich show her to be a master of the form (VARIETY),” Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 11, 2009.
17. Charles E. May, Book Review: The Red Convertible. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, January 3, 2009.