Back to the land of myth

IN her latest novel, “The Painted Drum,” Louise Erdrich returns to Ojibwe territory, the fertile and powerful landscape in which she has set several of her novels -- but it takes her a while to get there. In fact, the entire first part of the novel is set in a very different space -- a small New Hampshire town -- with characters far removed from the passionate, larger-than-life mythic beings for which Erdrich is known. Faye Travers, the narrator of this section, a middle-aged estate appraiser who lives with her mother, admits that she is “locked safely into [her] life.” The tumults of her youth -- the death of a sister, an incident with drugs -- seem to be things of the distant past. Her part-Indian heritage is something to which she pays little attention. Even her uneasy, intermittent relationship with Krahe, her reclusive sculptor-neighbor, is in a minor key.

It is only when Faye is asked to appraise the estate of a man who used to be an agent on an Ojibwe reservation that her settled existence is shaken up and the novel climbs to a higher level of tension and complexity. Among the possessions left by the dead man, she discovers a sacred drum that mesmerizes her with its sound -- a sound only she can hear. She steals the drum -- she can’t help herself -- and ultimately realizes that she must find its original home and take it there. Her journey to the North Dakota reservation, the people she meets there and the connections she makes will change her in important -- if somewhat predictable -- ways.

Part 2 tells us how the drum came to be, and pulls us into the reservation and into the past -- that true Erdrich country -- with the tale of Anaquot of the Anishinaabeg, a woman madly in love with a man who is not her husband. We learn how Anaquot leaves her husband and son for him, how she loses a daughter to the wolves on the way to her lover’s home (there is a hint that she may have pushed the young girl out of the wagon to save her newborn baby), only to find when she arrives that he had hidden a terrible secret from her all along.

It is a tale of vengeance and shrewd self-defense, hatred and survival, poison and magic song, sin and redemption, of spouses who must deal with longing and betrayal, of children who must suffer the consequences of their parents’ passions, of mothers and fathers who must forever skirt the holes in their lives that are caused by the loss of a child. Here, Erdrich soars in scenes that are resonant, poetic and exact, visions that will remain imprinted on the reader’s mind because of their brilliant mythic overtones.

Perhaps the most memorable moment in the novel occurs when the narrator of this section, Bernard Shaawano, grandson of Anaquot, confronts his abusive father -- the son Anaquot left behind, who is still mourning the loss of his sister -- and enables the older man to rethink the tragedy of his sister’s death: that it was his sister who “saw the wolves were only hungry, she saw their need was only need. She knew you were back there, alone in the snow. She saw the baby she loved would not live without a mother, and only the uncle knew the way. She saw clearly that one person on the wagon had to offer themself, or they all would die. And in that moment of knowledge, don’t you think, being who she was ... she jumped, my father, n’deydey, brother to that little girl, don’t you think she lifted her shawl and flew?”

Part 2 has many other characters who are magnetic, full of the power of folk tale. (In fact, Erdrich acknowledges that the tale of the little girl and the wolves is a story that has been handed down through generations among the Ojibwe). There is Anaquot’s rival, Ziigwan’aage the poisoner; her lover, Simon Jack, who has “a strict mind and a somewhat foolish heart”; and Old Shaawano, Anaquot’s husband, who arouses himself from drunken torpor after a visit from his dead daughter and creates the drum in a chapter that is by turns beautiful, tender, sad and filled with awe at the infinitely complex universe we inhabit.

Indeed, this is one of Erdrich’s great strengths: She creates for her readers a world where the harsh reality of daily existence for Indians -- in the past, but also in the present -- is depicted with clarity and without sentimentality. Poverty, illness, lack of jobs, disintegration of culture, confusion of identity, hopelessness, violence, alcoholism -- her characters suffer from all of these problems. Yet it is also a world where the sacred is believable and potent, where knowledge that is lost comes back in unexpected ways, where the mystical can reach out and bless broken lives.

This is an important theme in Part 3, set in the present on the Ojibwe reservation, where a destitute single mother is struggling to bring up her three children. One night, when there is nothing to eat in the house except a candy bar and “an inch of cherry cough syrup,” the children, trying vainly to stay warm, accidentally set fire to their house. As they are making their way through the woods to their closest neighbor, they almost freeze to death. The way in which their lives are affected by the painted drum -- and the way the children affect the drum’s future -- forms a powerful, satisfying end to this fine novel. *