Love Hurts

Love, love in all its happy and tragic transmutations--won, lost, spurned, or scorned--is an airy confection leavened with sentiment and angst. Miss an ingredient or err in its preparation and the thing will evanesce.

So when Rozin Roy, wife of Richard Whiteheart Beads, wanders into a storefront bakery in downtown Minneapolis early in “The Antelope Wife,” you have to wonder what’s next. Love, especially in its tragic transmutations, has been a part of Louise Erdrich’s fiction since the Kashpaw and Lamartine family lines first crossed in 1984. Yet where she succeeded most convincingly in “Love Medicine,” she proved less adept in later novels. At her best, she evoked awkward slapstick with surprisingly graceful prose; at her worst, she contrived circumstance, plotting without the certain nonchalance that lets the reader back into a wreckage unawares.

Perhaps then it is a good sign that before Rozin enters Frank Shawano’s bakery, she meets a woman with broken teeth sitting on the curb. This is the Antelope Wife, a woman stolen years earlier in a fit of possession, need and desire from a powwow in Montana by Shawano’s brother Klaus. Now trapped in Minneapolis, separated from family, growing old and weary, she is unable to escape her bond, however estranged she is from Klaus. This accidental encounter is good; it means more’s going on than meets the eye.

“The Antelope Wife” quickly develops into a madrigal, a dreamy chorus of voices spanning 100 years that rise at times in harmony and at other moments in happy dissonance. Erdrich once credited Isak Dinesen for this technique (witness “Seven Gothic Tales”), and while not all the voices are equally conducted, she seems content to let the disjunctions play, confident in their cumulative effect. Sometimes overwritten, sometimes mismanaged, “The Antelope Wife” benefits from the size of the canvas:

When Pvt. Scranton Roy’s cavalry troop raided an Ojibwa village near the Otter Tail River almost a century ago, the slaughter was predictable, but the outcome was not: A baby girl, tied to the back of a dog, escapes. A soldier, racked by guilt and fear, overtakes them. Four generations later, descendants of that raid have left the reservation for the city. Some are drunk, living in public places. Others are struggling through the 9 to 5. Promise and betrayal litter the streets and alleys like ancient glass beads--a motif, among many, that reoccurs throughout the novel--sewn into a pattern that cannot be read or distinguished, it has so long been forgotten.

Which of course makes the encounter inside Frank Shawano’s bakery all the more dangerous. But Erdrich plays danger well, and Rozin and Frank quickly fall together, becoming the dark magnets of this story, snapping in polarity, driving an engine they cannot control. They are of course the undoing of Richard Whiteheart Beads, once a tribal chairman hopeful, now a discarded husband whose pride in his wife and children sours into shame. As he searches in vain for the meaning of his loss, he plans his suicide and unwittingly draws into his web one of his twin daughters, Deanna. It is a breathtaking scene: One cold night, a pickup left running in a sealed garage, a glass of whiskey, a change of heart.

Afterward, Richard disappears into the city, living a sodden life with Klaus, two men ripped from the women they love. But Klaus cleans up, and Richard descends deeper into jealousy and misery. His fall is thorough, death the final balm. “Who will ever understand the misery love causes?” Cally, Deanna’s twin, is left to ask as she searches for her own lost life, a search that eventually leads back to the guilty aftermath of that cavalry raid and draws a thread through a tangled plot.

Yet no one ever knows the misery love causes, and the question haunts “The Antelope Wife” more deeply, perhaps unfairly, for the story behind the story. Dedicated to Erdrich’s children, it is her first novel not inscribed to her onetime mentor, confidant and collaborator, Michael Dorris. He is remembered, however, in a brief note: “This book was written before the death of my husband. He is remembered with love by all of his family.” Dorris’ suicide last year, following allegations that he had sexually abused their children, seems beaded into these pages, this story of irrevocable loss and mourning.

“All that followed, all that happened, all is as I have told,” Erdrich writes at the end of the novel, then asks: “Did these occurrences have a paradigm in the settlement of the old scores and pains and betrayals that went back in time? Or are we working out the minor details of a strictly random patter? Who is beading us . . . setting flower upon flower and cut-glass vine? Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bit of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of this earth?”

In a novel of many unanswered questions, she pictures love not as a delicate wisp, an airy confection at all but as something more primal, an uncontrollable compulsion that pushes the world to a terrible brink but never quite over. Seen through Cally’s eyes, Rozin and Frank have no say in their feelings for one another; they stare “at each other not with moon-glow or sitcom eyes, not stupidly or foolishly, but with the true and sad authority of mortal love.” And mortals live at the whim of fate or at the least under sway of a distant memory.

“In truth, he was wild for her because she smelled to him of the raw silk of his mother’s dress in childhood and of the dreamy terror of a hot summer thunderstorm. She smelled like the radishes his mother ate in secret as she read historical novels in the hay barn. She tasted of browned onions. Of silty ice. Of civet sweetness. Tart raspberry sweat and yeasty bread.”

Richly cadenced, deeply textured, Erdrich’s writing has the luster and sheen of poetry, each sentence circling deeper into emotion, motivation and rationale, until love touches not eternity but death, transforming “The Antelope Wife” into a story of longing and of longing assuaged, as sustaining as “Love Medicine,” serious, sometimes flawed but altogether passionate.