Playing to Her Strengths

Some days, you look for signs. Some days, when you’re not looking, bolts of insight come flashing down. Some days, you don’t see the signs until your mind’s camera replays the day’s moments for you late into the night. Something in Louise Erdrich’s writing reminds a reader that the world can be read like a book. Signs are everywhere--if you can only recognize them.

Perhaps it is the fact that her characters are, and have been for the last 20 years, primarily American Indians. Given the mythology, it is easy to imagine that once they moved through their lives, through forests and deserts, hardly making a sound, looking for signs that would guide them through this life and into the next.

But this is overly romantic. Erdrich, an Ojibwe woman from North Dakota and one of our most ambitious American writers, has hunted and dreamed her characters into life through eight novels, from the 1984 “Love Medicine,” to her latest, “The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.” She has brought the life of the American Indian into the homes of more readers than perhaps any other writer alive today, in that way that fiction can, often more effectively than history books.

These days, much of the fiction we read, transparently based on the life of the author or pieces of it, guides a reader gently to the conclusion that we are all the same and we all have the same problems. We cower together under the shadow of the same demons; environmental degradation, remnants of slavery and prejudice and tyranny. Fictionalized memoir, with its attendant Oprah factor (oh my God, that happened to me, too!), is supposed to make us feel less lonely. Erdrich creates characters that are real people. But they also speak for aspects of their culture and their time. Perhaps this is what it means to be an ambitious writer.

Center stage in “The Last Report” is Agnes, a piano-playing nun who leaves the convent because of her passion for Chopin. She falls in love (like a heat-seeking missile) with a man who is killed by a bank robber. She survives a flood of biblical proportion, and when she comes across the body of Father Damien Modeste, who was on his way north to the Little No Horse reservation to “missionize” Ojibwe Indians, Agnes decides to pose as a male priest and take his place at the Little No Horse reservation.

“I sympathize a great deal with Agnes,” Erdrich says, “as someone who, like a writer, listens to confessions, paying great attention and giving weight to little--as well as larger--sins. As a writer, I want to have sympathy for these sins. But as a mother, that becomes more complicated. As a mother, I have a protective instinct. As a mother, I try intensely to force things into a soothing normal situation for my children. It’s an opposite impulse, with children, to clean them up and make a peaceful life. That’s a joke because this family is pretty eccentric. Of course, nothing will ever be normal.” Erdrich says this with a smile, but it’s an impulse every mother understands. The bigger the chaos, the stronger the impulse.

Remembering Her Childhood

Almost every story ever written about Erdrich includes the fact that she is beautiful. At 47, she probably doesn’t look that different from the 18-year-old who left home in North Dakota for Dartmouth College in 1972. Her long, dark hair with flashes of auburn is pulled back in a ponytail. She is very tall, maybe 5 feet 10, and thin. Her eyes are dark and smiling, and her face is gentle. Still, you can imagine her refusing things and setting limits in that definite, firm way that some women have.

Even though she carries a stunning little replica of herself, 4-month-old Animiniki Kiniins (Azure), you do not feel--the way you do with some mothers and new babies--that the world has collapsed around the baby. Erdrich notices things and people around her. She carries the baby on her hip, and when the baby cries, Erdrich cuddles her, but does not stop the conversation. Upstairs in the hotel where we meet, her 17-year-old daughter, Persia, sleeps the enviable sleep of the teenager.

“I grew up in a household with a lot of interior organization, not outward,” she says of her childhood in North Dakota, referring to mealtimes and predictable schedules. Erdrich was the oldest of seven children (“I was a tyrannical baby-sitter”). Her mother is Ojibwe and her father German American. Her father gave her a nickel for every story she wrote. Her mother used to make books from construction paper for Louise to fill with stories. “There was so much warmth in that house. It was so messy and friendly. I could bring anyone home and they would be fed and welcomed.”

Many of Erdrich’s novels begin from a short story. The four families that have lived throughout Erdrich’s novels--the Lamartines, Pillagers, Morrisseys and Kashpaws--first appeared in a 1982 short story called “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,” three generations from the Turtle Mountain Reservation, three hundred miles from Erdrich’s childhood home.

In “The Last Report,” Agnes, as Father Damien, encounters the Kashpaws and Nanapush families, and their lives create much of the drama of the story. She participates reluctantly in the investigation into the life of Sister Leopolda (Pauline Puyat in a previous novel, “Tracks”), whom Damien believes is not worthy of the sainthood other members of the church would like to bestow upon her. In a previous life, Pauline has confessed to Father Damien, she abandoned a baby and murdered the baby’s father. There is also the constant threat of Damien’s false identity being revealed. At one point, she is tempted and succumbs to a relationship with another visiting priest.

Agnes, as Father Damien, remembers back from 1996 to her arrival at Little No Horse in 1912, rereading the unanswered reports she sent over the years to the Vatican. In these reports, she summarizes the many miracles and myriad examples of mercy and forgiveness that have made her life meaningful and her own deception forgivable.

All of Erdrich’s novels contain imaginative eccentric leaps, an element of what is tiresomely called magical realism. These seem more jarring to some readers than they do to others. One can’t help but notice that this quality is often found in the writing of authors from German and Latin households (Carlos Fuentes, for example) or, in this case, German and Native American. Her father, Erdrich tells me, trying to explain the surreal Bonnie and Clyde scene in which Agnes’ lover is killed in “The Last Report,” collected clips about failed bank robbery attempts. “I was very close with my dad. I wrote this new book for him.”

That book, “The Master Butcher,” not yet in print, is about the German side of her family. “My grandfather was a master butcher who came over from Germany after World War I with a singing club of master butchers,” says Erdrich. Her publisher, Cathy Hemming at Harper Collins, says it is Erdrich’s best book yet.

One Family Caught in Chaos

Erdrich was in the first class of women to attend Dartmouth, where she studied with a young anthropologist named Michael Dorris in the Native American Studies department that he headed. Dorris was part Modoc Indian. They married and had a literary partnership so much written about it could fill the pages of its own novel.

Their family included three adopted children, including Abel, a Sioux child with fetal alcohol syndrome Dorris had adopted in 1971; and they had three children of their own. Their books--fiction and even a little nonfiction--were written together and dedicated to each other. Dorris wrote “The Broken Cord” (1989), about fetal alcohol syndrome, and Erdrich wrote “The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year” (1995), about pregnancy and motherhood. There was much speculation about who the better writer was.

One of the couple’s adopted children was sent to prison for threats of violence against his girlfriend and his parents. In 1991, Abel, the subject of “The Broken Cord,” was hit by a car and killed at 23. In 1996, exhausted by his depression and insomnia, Erdrich separated from Dorris, leaving a nightgown on a hook that, in the oft-told tale, he could not bring himself to remove. In 1997, in a motel in New Hampshire, Dorris killed himself with pills and vodka, some said because of accusations that he had sexually molested two of his daughters.

No one, least of all Erdrich, wants to talk anymore about any of this. But it is, nonetheless, an extraordinary amount of pain and chaos in a single lifetime. Erdrich’s current project is to make order for her children out of all this chaos. I know the look of willful calm she wears.

About a year ago, Erdrich opened an independent bookstore in Minneapolis called Birchbark, which features books by Native American writers and also crafts and even wild rice grown by Ojibwe farmers. “I’m not really an activist,” she insists, despite years of speaking on behalf of native groups and in support of better education for Native American children. “The store is what I can do. It’s an outlet for grass-roots native organizations.” It has also given Erdrich a chance to read more current fiction, including Annie Proulx, Michael Cunningham and Jose Saramago, three of her current favorites.

“I like writers who return again and again to the same questions,” she says. “One of my questions is this terrible mother love, the impulse to save your child even as you destroy your child, the idea of rescuing a child over and over again. I’ve been chewing on this process of abandonment and rescue since ‘Beet Queen’ (1984), and I suppose I’ll continue to until I really get it right. I am writing through my personal history. I can’t fix everything for my children, but I can love them.”

A Female Support System

The question remains, how does Erdrich manage to write and be a mother and run a bookstore and survive what she has been through? “I rely on women,” she says. “I have a woman who helps me with paperwork and a woman who helps me with the children. Together we are a little female community that keeps the house running. I have a stack of books on emotional pain, which I come at from every direction using everything I can, from acupuncture to Western medicine. I have deep friendships, including a friend who knows exactly where to press and for how long. I have a background in native religion, which deals with the whole person, emotional and physical, relying a great deal on humor and laughter. I’m not worried anymore about who I am. I know what matters and what doesn’t matter. I let my children see who I am.”

“I love men, but I know less and less about them,” Erdrich says when I ask if she thinks men and women respond to her writing differently. “I find that I am closer now with women friends than I was earlier in my life.” She has what she calls “a very happy relationship” with Azure’s father, an Ojibwe political leader. “I love him in a simple way, and he is very involved in the baby’s life but he does not live with us,” she says. “He has made a baby swing over my computer with high-test climbing rope.”

Erdrich called her book on mothering “The Blue Jay’s Dance” because she saw that noisy, flamboyant, defiant dance--the bluffing a blue jay does to ward of predators--as a metaphor for a mother’s life, a woman’s life. While we talk, Azure patiently burbling on her mother’s lap, a blue jay has perched on a chair less than three feet from where we sit. Raven-like, it cocks its head and casts a glistening eye on each of us as we speak. There it sits, in the corner of the picture. I do not remember it until early the next morning.