The uneven Erdrich

For the past two weeks I've been immersing myself in Louise Erdrich and it hasn't always been a pleasant dip. I've taught The Painted Drum and the short story "Fleur" and I read her earliest novels as they were published, but I realized recently that there's a whole lot of Erdrich country out there that I've never explored.

So I read Tracks and Plague of Doves and The Antelope Wife, but I was underwhelmed. I found some amazing writing and wonderful characters and charming stories, but I kept losing track of the narrative thread. Besides, I get annoyed when I have to keep looking at a family tree to keep track of how the characters are connected. (Of course, I read some of them while I was on drugs...maybe I'd better give them a second chance later!)

Then I read The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Very impressive: a character I can care about through thick and thin, a story strong enough to carry my interest and make me regret that it has to end, and some startling images I won't soon forget. Definitely worth reading.

The last book in the pile was The Master Butcher's Singing Club, which I almost discarded because by that point I had pretty much overdosed on Louise Erdrich. But I finally opened it up in a desultory way and started reading.

None of my prior reading had prepared me for the wonders of this book.

The Master Butcher's Singing Club is similar to Erdrich's other novels in that it tells a story from several different perspectives, but in this case, the perspective characters are so compelling and believable (despite their unusual lives) that the switches are not jarring. Some of her other books assemble a host of smaller tales that link together in ways that are not always entirely clear; here, everything builds together into one brilliant narrative arc--a love story, or a story of several types of love: for a spouse, a child, a way of life, even a sausage. The novel includes the usual senseless tragedies common to Erdrich's work (including, in this case, both local tragedies and the horrors of two world wars), but through it all runs a tremendous sense of compassion and even, occasionally, hope. Erdrich is capable of expressing great depths of human dignity by means of hints and gestures, which in this novel build into a complex picture of a place and its people that I did not want to put away.

Which raises the question: why can't she write like that all the time?