BOOK REVIEWS: The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Novelist Louise Erdrich's new world includes book and baby

              Katy Read
              Star Tribune
              Wednesday, May 2, 2001
 

Father Damien Modeste, the central character in Louise Erdrich's new novel, has a secret: He's really a woman. If you haven't read "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse," don't worry; Erdrich's plot doesn't turn on the revelation. Readers discover it early on and without fanfare, when Father Damien undresses for bed, unwrapping breasts that are "small, withered, modest as folded flowers."

What is surprising is that Erdrich says she herself first learned the priest's secret when she wrote that scene.

"She took her clothes off -- that was it," Erdrich says with a laugh. "Before that, I hadn't really considered the gender of this person at all. And then, suddenly, there was that to consider."

The image of a writer gasping as her own cross-dressing protagonist disrobes in print may strain credulity. But Erdrich's characters do seem to have lives of their own -- lives and histories and intricate relationships that meander in and out of nearly all her books. Father Damien first appeared 17 years ago in "Love Medicine," her award-winning and best-selling first novel. It must get complicated keeping track of all those people -- mostly members of extended Indian and white families living on and around a North Dakota reservation -- but Erdrich says the pieces of her multifaceted plots fit together with amazing ease.

"Looking back on my descriptions of the priest, I found I had described in my previous books a very androgynous person, someone who really fit the description of the priest I later came up with," Erdrich says. It's as though somewhere in her subconscious, the plots of future novels are quietly crystallizing as she writes.

New life after sorrow

Since the suicide four years ago of her husband and writing partner, Michael Dorris, Erdrich has managed to redefine her life. At 46, the Minneapolis resident has a new novel, a new bookstore and a new baby: a chubby-cheeked 3-month-old girl whom Erdrich bounces on her knee as she talks. Tall and striking, with her dark hair clipped back and turquoise earrings dangling from her ears, Erdrich appears relaxed and cheerful. She smiles readily, cracks self-deprecating jokes -- on book tours, she gives readings rather than talks because "I try not to let anyone know how truly inarticulate I am" -- and, when asked about writing, conscientiously ponders her answers.

But Erdrich is careful to keep parts of her life private. She asks that her new daughter's name not be included in this story (though it has been published elsewhere) and won't discuss the baby's father, saying only that "he is very involved, and I really cherish the relationship." When the conversation touches on Dorris, she responds politely but firmly: No comment.

Her reticence isn't unexpected. The circumstances surrounding Dorris' death were undoubtedly agonizing for Erdrich and her children, and painfully public. The couple had recently separated, dissolving what had looked from the outside like a partnership of almost fairy-tale glamour and happiness, with literary collaborations, romantic book dedications and six children (three of whom Dorris had adopted before they married). Then, after Dorris' death, the news came out that he had been about to be charged with child sexual abuse.

Now, when asked the obvious questions -- how the trauma affected her work, what it's like to continue without the man who helped shape her writing -- Erdrich's smile doesn't disappear. But it visibly tightens. "It's not something I want to talk about," she says, shaking her head. "All I can say is that I was a writer all along and I was a writer before, so I just work the way I always did."

We talk instead about Birch Bark Books, the store she opened last year in the Kenwood neighborhood of Minneapolis. A cozy place with big windows and worn maple floors, the store reflects the interests of its part-German, part-Ojibwe proprietor. Popular literary fiction mingles with books by less well-known American Indian writers. There are crafts, foods, jewelry and music CDs by Indians. In the children's section, titles are chosen with particular care, because many books give kids "the most horrible misapprehensions about Native people," Erdrich says. She carries Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" series, despite its notoriously negative depictions of Indians, because customers request them and Erdrich herself likes the stories -- but near their shelf she has taped a note describing one Indian reader's dismay upon encountering a particularly harsh passage.

"They're wonderful books about pioneer life, and incredibly racist," Erdrich says. "We don't censor anything, but we really like to educate and present options to people."

Exploring her Ojibwe roots

An old, elaborately carved priest's confessional dominates one wall of the store, dragged from a salvage yard and decorated with branches, a fake dove and framed copies of 19th century Sioux and Chippewa treaties. The display could serve as a metaphor for Erdrich's novel, which follows Father Damien's gradually deepening appreciation for Indian spirituality. But Erdrich has her own reasons for responding to the massive oak artifact. She grew up a non-believing Catholic and later, like her fictional priest, felt drawn to traditional Ojibwe beliefs. But she continues to admire Catholicism's rituals and symbols.

"To me, the church wasn't about God at all, it was about wonderful statues and big organs and nuns' habits and contorted figures of Christ on the cross that are really strangely erotic," she says.

Erdrich lives near the store with her baby and three teenage daughters. She squeezes in writing time around the obligations of parenting. She has quit reviewing books for the New York Times -- too time-consuming, she says -- but scrawls reading recommendations on Post-it notes she pastes around her store, which "is a lot more fun for me ... it's more personal." She attends weekly classes in the Ojibwe language, fragments of which pepper her recent writing. And she spends "blissful" hours at the Minnesota Historical Society, poking through boxes of old letters and documents.

From these yellowed records, she plucks historical oddities and peculiar occurrences that reemerge in her fiction. Though her stories are full of far-fetched episodes, she disowns the "magical realist" label, insisting that even the strangest scenes -- such as one in her new novel in which snakes slither en masse from the earth when the priest plays the piano -- are based on real events.

"The things that I think are the most extraordinary are in fact historically documented incidents," she says. The snake story is based on a newspaper clipping about a mission in northern Minnesota. Others, like the scene in which a dead man keeps popping up to chat at his wake, come from less official-sounding sources. "I love old books about spontaneous human combustion and other weird tales. I've got shelves of books that are supernatural tales, tales of the unexpected, but they're documented facts. Like all the things that happen when tornadoes hit, or a newspaper reporting tons of meat falling out of the sky."

If her own books, consequently, fill up with bizarre incidents and quirky characters, so much the better. Who, she asks, wants to read about ordinary people?

Off the page, it's another matter. "I certainly don't live like my characters live," Erdrich says. These days, she says, she tries to keep her life as ordinary as possible.
 
 

By: Louise Erdrich.
Publisher: HarperCollins, 368 pages, $26.
 
 

-- Katy Read writes for the Toronto Globe and Mail, Family Money, Real Simple, Parents, MoneyCentral.com and the Star Tribune. She lives in Minneapolis.
 

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