LaRose by Louise Erdrich

Some books in a writer's oeuvre are like beacons. Louise Erdrich has shone such lights before, but in a prolific career – this is her fifteenth novel – LaRose is perhaps her brightest. A story of traditional justice, vengeance, and healing, LaRose is also a cohesive weaving of intergenerational stories that links back to the beginning of a writing career spanning more than thirty years. As with many of Erdrich's earlier works, LaRose is set within and on the fringes of a Native American reservation in North Dakota. That writers invent parallel locations is not new: Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and Hardy's Wessex, notably, spring to mind. In many ways, this gives more freedom and, in adept hands, paradoxically, more realism. There is much detail here – a world that includes the ubiquitous reservation casino and buffalo brought in for tourism. There are also the interiors: ramshackle houses and living rooms filled with antiques; cold boarding schools and seedy bars. Mostly, though, it is the outside world against which Erdrich sets her stories – the ever-present sky where 'gold pink clouds urgently mass', and where there are wood ticks, white-footed mice, and deer, 'with their senses bared'. Notably, it is this baring of senses that Erdrich's characters also experience. They are alive to the shifts in nature in the same way they are open to the spirit world and the pain they cause one another. LaRose begins with a disaster. In rapid sequence, Landreaux, an Ojibwe man, accidentally kills his neighbour's child, setting in motion the emotional crucible that follows. In Erdrich's previous novel, the National Book Award-winning The Round House (2012), a single event – the rape of Joe's mother – has similarly catastrophic consequence; accountability is sought through a quest for ideal justice in a world of 'best-we-can do' justice. In LaRose, Erdrich takes us further. In an attempt to ameliorate the tragedy, Landreaux and his wife offer their son LaRose to the dead boy's parents to raise as their own. It is an old custom ('our son will be your son now') in a historically fragmented culture where children are often raised by other members of the tribe. There is also a kind of wisdom of Solomon here, where the child is not cut in half, but shared – a curious fusing of ideologies wherein traditional custom merges uneasily with the Catholic priest's stance, 'Mary gave her child to the world'. An Ojibwe woman with child (Wisconsin Historical Society, Wikimedia Commons)LaRose – seen as the peacemaker and likened to St Francis – brings healing, but nothing is without its costs. Seeing the child used in this way, LaRose's new father laments the damage, 'he couldn't bear the weird indecency of what he felt they were doing to the child'. Familial grievances fester, then come to the surface as violence; loyalties and resentments are illuminated, sometimes by tenderness, sometimes by shocking malice. Characters evolve, though it is LaRose who is less formed; in effect he becomes a conduit for the reconciliation that connects the families and the rest of the community. In Erdrich's world, people, cultures, and history are inextricably intertwined, something repeatedly echoed by the eponymous title, which is not confined to a single LaRose. There are five LaRoses in all (each endowed with mythic healing abilities). Intersecting the main narrative is another, set in 1839. A local native American sells her daughter, LaRose, to fur traders at an Ojibwe trading post. LaRose escapes and saves one of the traders, only to be institutionalised in a Presbyterian school while the trader is drawn to her people, thus 'turning into an Indian while she was turning into a white woman'. Erdrich's writing can hone the smallest detail from the rainbow-coloured arrangement of a teenage girl's nail polishes to a sweeping arc of history. On the world stage, other parallels emerge. Beyond the paranoia of the Y2K scare, there are lies about weapons of mass destruction and the war in Iraq as a response to 9/11. Vengeance, never far from Erdrich's central concerns, plays a key role here. Although her characters recognise the great problem of Amer-ican aggression, ironically they enact their own retributions in cruel and often small-minded ways. Louise Erdrich (Wikimedia Commons)The narrative slows towards the middle, a loose weave which is perhaps the result of having so many threads. But Erdrich refuses to offer simple solutions. Like much else in Erdrich, it is a way of recognising how to survive. 'We are chased by things done to us in this life ... We are chased by what we do to others and then in turn what they do to us. We are always looking behind us, or worried about what comes next. We only have this teeny moment. Oops it's gone.' LaRose is less episodic than Erdrich's other novels, particularly her first, Love Medicine (1984); there is an overall sense that Erdrich has come full circle. In LaRose, 'love medicine' becomes the food for a younger generation who are left to carry the story forward, yet when LaRose himself asks one of the elders about the moral of an old story, her indignant reply is, 'Moral? Our stories don't have those!'

Sarah Myles

From the New Issue

Tremor by Teju Cole

‘When we talk about the Middle Ages: Revisiting the power of periodisation’ by G. Geltner

‘Rinbo Abdo’, a new poem by Philip Mead

No Church in the Wild by Murray Middleton