A new novel and a stage version of Erdrich’s previously published The Master Butcher’s Singing Club were Erdrich’s literary contributions to 2010. The attempt at translating Erdrich’s works from the page to the stage began when director Francesca Zambello came to Minneapolis in the summer of 2009 to direct her stage version of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, and spent much time at the Kenwood Café next door to the Erdrich sisters’s Birchbark Book Store. Zambello came into the bookstore from time to time, where she picked up a copy of The Master Butcher’s Singing Club. That fateful encounter led Zambello to approach Erdrich about staging the novel as a play, bringing in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman to condense the book into a stage version. It was odd that Erdrich, who wrote the anti-Little House children’s book series, would become invested in a project created by the woman who produced a musical based on one of the Ingalls-Wilder novels. Erdrich stated, “Ma [a character in the Little House series] was a racist, and there’s no way around it.” Little House never gets around to suggesting what it was like for native people to be “invaded by Pa and his ax.”1
The Marsha Norman adaptation of Erdrich’s novel played at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis from September 9, 2010, to October 30. The reviews were not, of course, about the book version of the story, but about the stage version, the acting, the set design, and all that goes into making a play, rather than the considerations of what goes into writing a novel. Erdrich advised on the project, but did not take an active role in translating the work from novel to play. The reviews were mixed, as in this one, where the reviewer compliments the cast members’ acting ability (particularly Lee Mark Nelson as the butcher), offers a summary of the plot, and compliments Erdrich’s original novel, but went on to say,
. . . The difficulty of editing an epic down to size becomes apparent . . . the story suffers from its faithfulness to the script . . . A couple of historical characters step in, as though at Ft. Snelling, to dramatize the retelling. It feels false at best.2
Another review in Variety was kinder, if measured in the response to the play,
This elegant adaptation by Marsha Norman . . . of a sweeping multi-decade novel, “The Master Butcher’s Singing Club,” puts forth impressive contributions all around. Norman’s script captures the essential delicate nature of Midwestern author Louise Erdrich’s prose, and spreads just enough narration among characters to keep things moving without making it feel like you’re being read to.3
In a Theater Journal review of the play from September 25, 2010, Robert Hubbard also gave a mixed report,
The Guthrie deserves credit for undertaking ambitious productions like The Master Butcher’s Singing Club . . . several creative and sensitive attempts to highlight clashing cultures within the story served the production well; flourishes of fine acting, lovely imagery, and inventive design produced many delightful moments. If only the promise of the production could have overcome an unfortunate misfire in the depiction of Cyprian [a gay character within the story], as well as a wandering and unfocused script.4
Not one of the reviewers criticized Erdrich, nor should they have. A writer’s work stands on its own; what readers or other artists do with that work after publication is usually not under the control of the original author. Marsha Norman is a prize-winning playwright, but this is simply not her best work. Scheduled to run through October 30, the play closed five days early.
Reviewer Marianne Combs blamed not the quality of the production but rather the management of the Guthrie Theater. A representative of the theater stated that the play was closing early because tickets were not selling. Combs argued that the reason the tickets were not selling was not because the play was of poor quality (she also gave it a mixed review), but because the Guthrie had scheduled The Master Butcher’s Singing Club opposite a proven production. She states,
The Great Game: Afghanistan ran from September 29–October 17, creating serious competition for Guthrie audiences for a large chunk of TMBSC’s run. The Great Game: Afghanistan came with rave reviews in hand, while TMBSC was a world premiere, with no stage pedigree.5
Thus, the translation of Erdrich’s work from novel to stage was short lived, with only one small after note—The Southhampton Writers Conference at Stony Brook, NY, for the summer of 2011 chose Marsha Norman as a workshop leader in playwriting for the event, and on July 17, Norman offered a reading of the play in the Avram Theater in association with the resident theater company at the Writers Conference, New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre.6 The play was only marginally successful, but Erdrich had another, different success earlier in the year to look back upon with pleasure.
In January of 2010, her 13th novel (not counting The Crown of Columbus) was released and caused a great flurry of interest, but not necessarily for the usual reasons. Shadow Tag details a failing marriage with a wife falling into alcoholism, confused and traumatized children, and a husband who is a manipulative and egocentric artist. The husband in the story, Gil, is an artist who has built his career from a single subject—multiple paintings of his wife, Irene, but these are no ordinary portraits. Gil paints her naked in sexually suggestive poses that border on soft porn. He is a parasite at worst, and at best, a deluded man who uses his wife’s beauty to further his own career. He does not truly love her, but needs her, objectifies, and uses her. Eventually, Irene can no longer tolerate his demanding, manipulative behavior. Nevertheless, she cannot bring herself to confront him directly. Instead, she manipulates him. A writer of journals, she knows that he reads what she writes in them, so she deliberately plants misinformation—that she is having affairs—in the Red Journal, while keeping a second one, the Blue Notebook, in a safe deposit vault where her true thoughts and actions are recorded. Gil is not only destroying their marriage, he is also physically abusing their children.
Although this novel is a thinly disguised biography of the Erdrich–Dorris relationship, most reviewers completely ignored that fact, as if it were not an elephant in the room. One reviewer who did address the issue straight on was Ron Charles, writing for The Washington Post, who stated the obvious—that readers would certainly recognize the characters and plot as originating directly from Erdrich’s personal experience, which Charles labels as “voyeuristic temptations.” He then praises Erdrich for drawing on her own experience to create a work of fiction that he believes is about universal tragedy, not simply Erdrich’s private experiences.7
Oddly, though, Charles writes that modern writers cannot or will not transform personal trauma into universal experience—odd, because it would seem that it is recognition of the universal in personal tragedy or triumph that keeps posters and lurkers on social media sites returning again and again to the stories they read there. Admittedly those who post stories of personal experience on social media sites are not professional writers, not usually anyway, but rather everyday people. Still, Charles offers no evidence to support his assertion.
Overall, however, Charles’s review is probably the most balanced of all the reviews printed. He recognizes, where many other reviewers do not, that the style in this novel is different from her earlier novels, stating, “. . . she keeps ‘Shadow Tag’ tightly focused, abandoning entirely the discursive style of her previous books.” He continued with, “What would have been oppressively grim in a longer work remains arresting in this taut tale, which comes to us from the three narrators as a series of finely cut moments, each just a page or two long.”8
Another reviewer who took on the obvious is Patrick Condon, who wrote,
Readers familiar with Erdrich’s life story will certainly see echoes in “Shadow Tag.” In 1997, her estranged husband, the writer Michael Dorris, committed suicide amid allegations of child abuse—events that parallel some of the plot strands in “Shadow Tag.” But knowledge of that history isn’t necessary to admire Erdrich’s accomplishments here, as she weaves painfully realistic depictions of alcoholism and abuse into a domestic drama that builds an almost thrillerlike momentum.9
Another reviewer, who like Ron Charles, not only addressed the commonalities between this novel and Erdrich’s private life, but also the issues of the very different writing style is Leah Hager Cohen:
. . . in places, “Shadow Tag” seems more like notes for a novel than fully realized fiction. (“The tragic irony of it offended him.” “His outlook was sentimental while hers was tragic.” “They might hate each other, at least, Irene might hate Gil, while he had no idea how much he hated Irene because he was so focused on winning back her love.”) Elsewhere though, Erdrich’s unbridled urgency yields startlingly original phrasing (“the christbirthing pinecone air”) as well as flashes of blinding lucidity.10
Here, Cohen recognizes the novel’s different style, and demonstrates those differences with examples from Shadow Tag. Erdrich’s style, though different from what she usually employs, is not “wrong” or “bad” or even, as Cohen suggests merely “notes for a novel.” Ernest Hemingway, for instance, used short declarative sentences, but no one has ever said that The Sun Also Rises (or any of his other novels) is merely notes for a novel. It is tempting to do so with Erdrich, however, because her other works are written in a style more reminiscent of William Faulkner than Hemingway. Like Faulkner, Erdrich wrote beautifully poetic and descriptive long flowing sentences. Shadow Tag partakes more of Hemingway than Faulkner. However, Cohen gets it exactly right when she discusses the problem of whether to compare the novel with Erdrich’s own life:
It’s a fool’s errand to parse fact from fiction. Even given such glaring similarities, to acknowledge them in a review would seem prurient, loathsome—if Erdrich hadn’t seeded her narrative with what feels like an imperative to do so.11
She has put her finger on the reason why so many reviewers of this novel chose to ignore the obvious connections between fact and fiction—“to review them would seem prurient, loathsome.” She is also exactly right when she states that Erdrich, purposely or not, invites such comparisons, tantalizes knowledgeable readers to wonder whether she did or did not drink heavily during the last years of her marriage, whether or not Dorris did invade Erdrich’s privacy by reading her journals, and so on. And yet, in making such comparisons, even wondering about them, many readers, including this author, felt fascinated and yet horrified by their own fascination, as if they had dreamed of being a window peeper, woke up and found themselves standing outside a window, observing a sexual act between strangers taking place beyond the pane.
It seems odd that Erdrich would choose to play out in public what she had declared in so many interviews as being a topic she did not wish to discuss, even though she became more forthright as the years passed. Recall that at one point she told an interviewer that she did not believe in “trying a man in the press after he is dead and judging him guilty or innocent.”12 This is the sturdily spoken belief that most people have been taught from childhood, that it is wrong to speak ill of the dead because they are not there to offer a defense. Still, if a person made errors, minor or major, while they were alive, dying does not negate those errors, nor should it bestow a halo where none was deserved.
Of course, part of Erdrich’s reluctance to discuss Dorris’s private failings and personal anguish may have been because few, if any, of their friends and acquaintances were aware of those problems and most openly declared their puzzlement and confusion when Dorris committed suicide. If Erdrich had spoken at length of Dorris’s failings back when Dorris first died, she might have been accused of lying at worst and at best of breaking the commonly held social pact that one should not speak ill of the dead. Dorris left her without a defense, manipulating her even after his death.
Viewed in that light, Shadow Tag is not Erdrich working out her psychological trauma in public, nor is it an attempt to malign a dead person. Rather, it is Erdrich’s courageous attempt to defend herself in the best way she knows how: through writing fiction. If some of her readers are embarrassed or confused by this effort, then that is something over which she has no control. She has had her say and that will probably be the end of that discussion. Occasional themes of suicide, of marital strife, of child abuse, or other personally lived trauma may still appear in her future work, but that is what a writer does—takes their own experience and their own observations of the experience of others and weaves tales that astonish or shock or delight—sometimes all three. We only read of it, but the author has to live with it.
What the readers of this new novel did not know, nor did the people who attended the theater production of The Master Butcher’s Singing Club in the summer of 2010, was that Erdrich was enduring a private health crisis at the same time. She had been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer and was undergoing aggressive treatment, which made her hair fall out, at the very moment the play opened. She stated that she had sat in the audience wearing a “gorgeous wig,” terrified that a fate that had befallen one of the characters in The Master Butcher might also be her own fate.13 Demonstrating strength and tenacity that she has always owned while others in similar situations have succumbed to despair, Erdrich is now free of cancer, and two years later, in the fall of 2012, has two new books out. Perhaps, that is where the strength to face life’s most difficult challenges lies: in her writing, but also in her family. Those two seem to be the wells from which she draws the healing power to survive all. In the afterword to this latest novel, The Round House, Erdrich thanks members of her family for their support during this difficult time, but she specifically thanks her daughters, Persia, Pallas, Aza, and Nenaa’ikiizhikok.
The Round House addresses the issue of violence against women of color, and against Native American women in particular, which, coincidentally, was the subject of this author’s first novel, Elsie’s Business.14 In Erdrich’s novel, just turned 13-year-old Joe Coutts narrates the story, one of the only instances where Erdrich does not employ multiple narrators to tell the story. Joe is the only child of the May/December marriage of Geraldine and Bazil Coutts. The pregnancy was such a surprise that Joe is given the nickname “Oops,” perhaps something that Erdrich herself felt when she found herself in her early forties and pregnant for the fourth time with daughter Nenaa’kiizhikok.
Young Joe says, “I’d always had the perfect family—loving, rich by reservation standards, stable—the family you would never run away from. No more.”15 The situation that young Joe wants to escape is the rape of his mother, Geraldine, which is horrific enough, but Geraldine’s withdrawal into passivity and mental instability is perhaps as horrific as the event itself. Some reviewers have called this novel a coming-of-age story, and that it is, but in most coming-of-age stories, the event that propels the young person from child to adult is something often so innocuous that adults within the story are unaware of it. Here, Joe is not nudged gently into adulthood, but thrust, as violently and rudely as the crime of rape itself. His early reaction to what happened is understandable, perhaps predictable when he says, “I wanted to know that whoever had attacked my mother would be found, punished and killed.”16
While the story told here may be Erdrich’s best ever written, a story that can be appreciated for the beautiful way it is crafted, this is also a book about social justice for which the story is the carrier. Erdrich draws upon multiple areas wherein American Indians still face challenges in obtaining justice, such as the Major Crimes Act of 1885, which places jurisdiction over seven major crime categories committed on Indian reservations under the FBI, regardless of whether the perpetrator of the crime is an American Indian or not. In other words, for any major crime committed on an Indian reservation, the tribal police do not have the authority to investigate or prosecute, but must call in the FBI, and therein lies multiple problems. First, in any criminal investigation near a reservation, someone must determine exactly where the crime was committed to determine who has jurisdiction, and this quibbling and dallying can and often does delay investigations, allow time for crime scenes to be degraded or disturbed, and ultimately delay or deny justice for the victim. In The Round House, Erdrich explores the problems of jurisdiction in the investigation of Geraldine’s rape. The fogginess, in some cases, rigidity of federal, state, and local laws and policies in relation to American Indians makes it more difficult to solve crimes committed against them. The instances of rape among American Indian women is one of the most shocking of all crimes committed against American Indian people in general. In the Afterword of The Round House, Erdrich wrote:
This book is set in 1988, but the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists. “Maze of Justice,” a 2009 report by Amnesty International included the following statistics: 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 per cent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted.17
No reader should be surprised that Erdrich is referencing historical instances of injustice, although perhaps, with the exception of A Plague of Doves, she has usually not included references to specific laws and policies that affect Native Americans. Her writing here is a return to that lyrical style she has more commonly used than the cryptic, shorthand style of her previous novel, Shadow Tag. In The Round House, she also uses that time slippage in the narrative that is typical of her work. For example, early in the novel, Joe as a 13-year-old narrator slips into the future Joe that he will be as an adult. Erdrich writes, in Joe’s perspective, “Much later after I had gone into law and gone back and examined every document I could find . . .”
The reviews that are available (as of this writing in early 2013), are uniformly complimentary, with never a naysayer anywhere. For example, Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, who has reviewed multiple Erdrich novels, wrote that The Round House is a powerful novel, worth reading,18 while the Minneapolis Star Tribune called the book an “artfully balanced mystery.”19 Publishers Weekly gave the novel a coveted starred review, stating that “The story pulses with urgency as [Erdrich] probes the moral and legal ramifications of a terrible act of violence.”20
In March 2013, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed the Violence Against Women Act, a renewal of a previous law with some additions, which among other provisions remedies the exact issue that Erdrich addressed in The Round House. Prior to the passage of this act, White men who abused American Indian women on reservations could not be prosecuted by the tribal court system, which meant that White men usually escaped justice for these crimes. Perhaps, Erdrich’s book played some role in righting this injustice.
In November 2012, The Round House won the prestigious National Book Award. There were four other contenders for this annual award including Junot Diaz for This Is How You Lose Her,21 but Erdrich was the only woman nominated for this year’s award. Diaz, like Erdrich is also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, often called the genius award. Erdrich is the only woman writer nominated.
The second book, Chickadee, that Erdrich published in 2012 is the fourth children’s book in her Birchbark series.22 As previously stated, this one takes up the next generation of the Omakayas character Erdrich first created in the Birchbark series. The plot features two brothers, Chickadee and Makoons, who become separated early in the story. Chickadee then goes on a quest to reunite with his brother, counting on the strength of his namesake chickadee to help him. In the back pages included in Erdrich’s third book in the series, The Game of Silence, Erdrich stated that she had started the fourth book in the series, which she titled Twelve Moons Running. Something changed, obviously. Perhaps that book morphed into Chickadee, or perhaps Twelve Moons Running is yet a different book that will come out at some time in the future.
Interestingly, other reviewers of this children’s book series are also comparing them to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series. A reviewer for the New York Times wrote:
[In this] story of a young Ojibwa girl, Omakayas, living on an island in Lake Superior around 1847, Louise Erdrich is reversing the narrative perspective used in most children’s stories about nineteenth-century Native Americans. Instead of looking out at ‘them’ as dangers or curiosities, Erdrich, drawing on her family’s history, wants to tell about ‘us’, from the inside. The Birchbark House establishes its own ground, in the vicinity of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House’ books.23
To equal Wilder’s seven books in the Little House series, Erdrich needs to publish only three more, but it would not be surprising for Erdrich, perhaps one of the most prolific modern authors in any genre, to far exceed that number.
1. Michael Tortorello, “Staging Erdrich,” Minnesota Monthly, September 1, 2010.
2. Tom Gihring, “Review: Guthrie’s “Master Butcher’s Singing Club” Hits Mostly High Notes,” Minnesota Monthly, October 2010.
3. Review, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club, Variety, http:www.variety.com/review/VE117943656/.
4. Robert Hubbard, Review: The Master Butcher’s Singing Club. Theater Journal, September 25, 2010, Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu.
5. Marianne Combs, “Why is the Master Butcher’s Singing Club closing early?” MPR News, October 26, 2010.
6. Southampton Writers Conference Press Release, http:www.stonybrook.edu/writers/writers/reservations.shtml
7. Ron Charles, “Love in the time of bitterness,” The Washington Post, February 3, 2010.
8. Ibid.
9. Patrick Condon, “Compelling ‘Shadow Tag’ a departure for Erdrich,” AP Worldstream, February 12, 2010.
10. Leah Hager Cohen, “Cruel Love,” The New York Times Sunday Book Review, February 5, 2010.
11. Ibid.
12. Staff writer, “Wife Claims Dorris Was Suicidal For Years: Only She Knew of His Tormented Secret,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 19, 1997.
13. Rohan Preston, “With New Novel Out, Erdrich Is Exulting in Life,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 30, 2012.
14. Frances Washburn, Elsie’s Business (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
15. Louise Erdrich, The Round House (New York: Harper, 2012), 96.
16. Ibid., 12.
17. Ibid., Afterword.
18. Michiko Kakutani, “Ambushed on the Road to Manhood: ‘The Round House,’ Louise Erdrich’s New Novel,” New York Times, October 15, 2012.
19. James Cihlar, “Fiction: The Round House,” by Louise Erdrich, Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 29, 2012.
20. Publishers Weekly, July 16, 2012.
21. Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her (New York: Riverhead Press, 2012).
22. Louise Erdrich, Chickadee (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
23. New York Times, Quoted on Barnes & Noble webpage, http://www.Barnesandnoble.com/w/birchbark-house-louise-erdrich/1100541474.