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Jun. 15th, 2011 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
decemberthirtyFinished Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves yesterday. It is a difficult book to summarize, and some of the reviews I've seen have described it as disjointed. This may be true. The book often (particularly in the second half) feels like a collection of linked stories, lacking the narrative unity of a true novel. But I'm not sure whether this is a failing, or simply a consequence of the fact that this is a novel of geography rather than of people. Although Erdrich creates some compelling characters in the book, she seems less interested in them than she is in the relationship between history and place.
Over the course of the book, Erdrich gives us the entire life story of the town of Pluto, North Dakota, from its earliest beginnings to its slow decline and death. Pluto is a white town sitting on the edge of an Ojibwe reservation, and there is ugly history there: in 1911, five members of a family were murdered on their farm, and in response a group of men from the town lynched three Indians who had nothing to do with the crime. The weight of this event exerts a sort of gravitational pull on Erdrich's characters; even generations later, their orbits are dragged out of line.
The greatest strengths of the book come in the first half, in the slow revelation of Pluto's bloody history and in Erdrich's brilliantly effective way of making us feel the tangled threads that tie everyone in town back to the violence in 1911. The first section of the book ends with a young girl named Evelina describing how, in the 1970s, she copied that history into her diary and then "wrote down the relatives of everyone I knew--parents, grandparents, way on back in time. I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw an elaborate spider web of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper." It's powerful stuff.
The book weakens a bit in the second half--this is where the disjointedness comes in. In maintaining her focus on history and geography, Erdrich sometimes lets her characters slide. We get episodes from the lives of many people, but there are often large gaps in between the episodes. In the case of characters that I cared about, I wanted those gaps filled in. With characters that I was less attached to, I found it hard to remember their position in Evelina's spider web. Erdrich devotes the final chapter to a woman who has appeared in the story only briefly, and as an infant. She's the right person to narrate the decline of the town, but she's not a character that readers have had any opportunity to get attached to. We do eventually learn who committed the murders, but by the time it comes, that knowledge doesn't seem to matter much--it is not a resolution to the parts of the story that matter.
Despite these flaws, it's a very interesting book. It certainly came at the right time for me, just as I'm beginning to open up again to working on my own book about the death of a small town. Of course, my book is very different from The Plague of Doves, but nevertheless it fired my imagination in ways that I'll continue to think about a lot as I go. And the prose! My god, Erdrich's prose is something else--almost strong enough to carry me right over the book's flaws without noticing them.
Over the course of the book, Erdrich gives us the entire life story of the town of Pluto, North Dakota, from its earliest beginnings to its slow decline and death. Pluto is a white town sitting on the edge of an Ojibwe reservation, and there is ugly history there: in 1911, five members of a family were murdered on their farm, and in response a group of men from the town lynched three Indians who had nothing to do with the crime. The weight of this event exerts a sort of gravitational pull on Erdrich's characters; even generations later, their orbits are dragged out of line.
The greatest strengths of the book come in the first half, in the slow revelation of Pluto's bloody history and in Erdrich's brilliantly effective way of making us feel the tangled threads that tie everyone in town back to the violence in 1911. The first section of the book ends with a young girl named Evelina describing how, in the 1970s, she copied that history into her diary and then "wrote down the relatives of everyone I knew--parents, grandparents, way on back in time. I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw an elaborate spider web of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper." It's powerful stuff.
The book weakens a bit in the second half--this is where the disjointedness comes in. In maintaining her focus on history and geography, Erdrich sometimes lets her characters slide. We get episodes from the lives of many people, but there are often large gaps in between the episodes. In the case of characters that I cared about, I wanted those gaps filled in. With characters that I was less attached to, I found it hard to remember their position in Evelina's spider web. Erdrich devotes the final chapter to a woman who has appeared in the story only briefly, and as an infant. She's the right person to narrate the decline of the town, but she's not a character that readers have had any opportunity to get attached to. We do eventually learn who committed the murders, but by the time it comes, that knowledge doesn't seem to matter much--it is not a resolution to the parts of the story that matter.
Despite these flaws, it's a very interesting book. It certainly came at the right time for me, just as I'm beginning to open up again to working on my own book about the death of a small town. Of course, my book is very different from The Plague of Doves, but nevertheless it fired my imagination in ways that I'll continue to think about a lot as I go. And the prose! My god, Erdrich's prose is something else--almost strong enough to carry me right over the book's flaws without noticing them.
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Date: 2011-06-16 06:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 01:38 pm (UTC)