The Novels of Louise Erdrich

“Or the ones I read for class, anyway”

Merry late Christmas, everyone! I didn’t really do a Christmas post this year, besides the “wish lists” that I put together about games I want on my computer, but calling those Christmas posts is like calling La Croix soda. You’re maybe right, if you don’t think about it too hard and have zero taste, but you’re still wrong. But this isn’t a Christmas post either! It has nothing to do with Christmas! And that’s ok, because as much as I love the holiday, there wasn’t much of a Christmas this year. For anybody. Because, you know, the Coronavirus. I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone of that (except myself, as I forgot my mask for the first time ever today). But merry Christmas, anyway. And/or happy nondenominational winter holiday if you celebrate something else or celebrate nothing at all! I think it’s good practice to wish goodwill upon others, even if they don’t celebrate a slightly-arbitrary holiday. So I hope you have a pleasant winter season!

I celebrated Christmas this year by visiting my grandparents as safely as could be reasonably done, but that was a bit nerve-wracking so I also just kind of lounged around with my family and ate Christmas cookies and watched Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. But I also celebrated the fact that my classes were finished and I did well in them. My semester ended just a couple of weeks ago, and I’m one step closer to graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in environmental sustainability from the University of Illinois. And I’ve written before about some of the classes I’ve taken, namely the ones in GIS, but I haven’t actually talked much about my other classes, the creative writing and English ones, that I take for my second major, one in creative writing. I don’t talk about those creative writing classes very much because they don’t, in my opinion, pose much interest to people outside of the field. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve gotten a ton out of them, especially the workshop classes, but it’s a bit boring for both parties to have a creative writer explain writing practices and craft mechanics to non-writers. But the literature classes on the other hand, those are a different story. Those I don’t think are boring to talk about.

As part of my creative writing major, I had to take a class on authors whose entire bodies of work (or one or two major pieces) have made significant contributions to the English literary canon. So, you know, since Shakespeare’s a separate class entirely, you get major authors classes about John Milton, William Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway probably, and a handful of others. The trend for those classes is typically that it’s about some old white dude who died a while ago. Which is fine, I guess. I mean, I think Faulkner’s worth studying, but there isn’t a lot of diversity in the major authors classes historically. Except recently there seems to be a shift taking place since I was able to take a major authors class on Louise Erdrich, a Native American woman from Minnesota who, get this, is still alive. The first book we read for class was published in 2020, just before the pandemic no less. For a class type that’s usually entirely about dead white guys, a focus on Louise Erdrich makes it quite an outlier. And it was great.

I was lucky enough to be a part of the course under the tutelage of Jodi Byrd, and they have a Wikipedia page, which I think is one of the coolest things ever. It’s my personal goal one day to have my own Wikipedia page, so it’s always interesting for me to see if anyone I know has pages of their own. And Dr. Byrd has one! They’re also super cool and nice and are a really great instructor, so they made the class a great experience overall. But even the best teacher can’t do anything with shitty material, so it’s lucky for the class that Louise Erdrich and her books make for great discussion and writing subjects. I mean, it’s kind of a given that she’s a good author, since we wouldn’t have a class about her if she wasn’t, but the quality of her writing and stories is exceptionally high, a level that I hope to shoot for myself one day but may end up falling short. But that doesn’t matter because reading the books themselves has been, and likely always will be, a pleasure. The novels of Louise Erdrich that I have read are, with one exception, some of the best works of fiction I’ve come across. And, as a white man of European descent, these novels have helped to expose me to the stories and cultures of at least one group of indigenous peoples, the Chippewa, and I think that experience alone is valuable enough that everyone, especially white males of European descent, should read these books. Even if we aren’t the primary audience.

I believe the purpose of reading books should be twofold; one side should be because you enjoy the story that you’re reading, and the other side should be that you’re reading to stimulate your mind, learn more about the world, and expand your horizons. I genuinely believe that reading is a powerful tool to fight ignorance, division, and hatred. As long as you aren’t reading something like Mein Kampf or Breitbart or other things that actively promote ignorance, division, and hatred, anyway. But like most things worth reading, Erdrich’s novels are the types of works that challenge the reader continuously, challenging them to think about new perspectives and solutions to problems, challenging them to empathize with characters that might not be outwardly likeable or may be very different than what the reader is used to, and challenging them to doubt their own perceptions and beliefs. In a nutshell, challenging the reader to think critically. If you ask me, the key to reading any work by Erdrich is that indigenous American peoples are still alive. They’re a dynamic, diverse, continuous force. And that may sound stupid and obvious at first, but the native peoples in Erdrich’s works don’t act like the native peoples in the typical American canon. You won’t find the honorable lone wolf or romantic sole survivor a la Last of the Mohicans or the like. Those are one-note characters that reinforce the notion that native peoples are dead and gone and we shouldn’t think about them or the genocide that our country committed against them. Erdrich’s characters, like real indigenous peoples, challenge those concepts and explore the truth that Native Americans are still alive, after surviving several apocalypses, and to ignore them is a further injustice. If I learned any single thing in this class, it’s that. The continuity of native peoples. I think that’s a solid way of summing up Erdrich’s body of work.

But what about the specifics, then? It’s one thing to look at the big picture, but the point of novels is to get into the details. So I’m going to talk about that; in no particular order (with, again, one exception), I’d like to summarize and review the eight novels of Louise Erdrich (out of her 15+ novels, mind you) that I read over the last three months or so. But before that, some background: Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and was born in 1954. In her texts she refers to her people as belonging to the Anishinaabe culture, and she’s been writing and publishing work since the early 80’s. She runs a bookstore in Minnesota, where she’s largely lived her entire life, and you may or may not recognize her from here appearance on a PBS special a few years back. I guess that was kind of a thing. She’s won plenty of awards and her novel Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer back in 2008. Her works deal a lot with both historical indigenous life and modern (or modern for the 80’s, 90’s, and early 00’s) life. While I haven’t read all her works, I plan on still reading more of them, even after I’ve already read a ton. If that doesn’t tell you anything, I’m not sure what would. But here are my thoughts on eight of the novels of Louise Erdrich. Quick content warning: these books contain a lot of sexual violence and racial violence. Something indigenous peoples unfortunately know quite well.

The Night Watchman (2020)

This was the first book we read this semester, and also Erdrich’s most recent book. I’ll be honest, it ranks pretty low on my list of the Erdrich novels I’ve read, not because it’s a bad book but because I feel that it’s subpar compared to her other novels. The novel follows Patrice, a teenager on a reservation in North Dakota, as she tries to find her missing sister, while at the same time also following Thomas, the tribal chairman, as he fights back against the United State’s government attempt at legally terminating native peoples. It’s a good story, maybe a little pedantic at times (though I could just be projecting that, as I wasn’t sure what to expect when I read this), but it lacks the interesting characters that her other novels have. I like one of the main characters, Patrice, fine enough, and Thomas is fine, too, but they’re both a little too perfect. Even their flaws seem designed to engender compassion for them, which is fine, but I felt like it came across a little too strong. I’d still recommend it as a history book, or a study in the historical response by native peoples to government regulations, but Erdrich has better novels.

Future Home of the Living God (2018)

Jumping from the first book I read this semester to the last, I’m gonna be going out of order a bit, because I don’t want to end with this one. Future Home is a dystopian thriller about a near-future that’s going through a sort of backwards evolution. A fanatical religious group takes over and women are arrested and detained to bear children. Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so too. Except in this one, the women and giving birth to monkeys for some reason. Why does this happen? What does it mean? Who knows! Who cares! I do not care for this book, and I’m not alone in feeling that way. Ideas are thrown in seemingly at random, nothing gets wrapped up by the end, characters and ideas show up and disappear and reappear for no apparent reason, the main narrator is an insufferable child, and the most interesting character, in my opinion, only gets like fifty pages of appearance in the book. Sure, the writing on a sentence-by-sentence level is as high-quality as any of Erdrich’s books, but the actual story itself gets lost in itself. This is actually the only book of Erdrich’s that I wouldn’t recommend. It’s got its moments, but is overall an unsatisfying read and a major outlier from the rest of her texts.

Love Medicine (1984)

Alright, now that Future Home is out of the way, I’ll go back to the books in the order that I read them. While I thought Night Watchman was pretty solid, Love Medicine was what made me realize the strength of Erdrich’s writing. It’s really more a collection of short stories than it is a novel, but each story follows different characters in the same area, and how they interact, their impressions of each other, their histories, and the like. It’s a fascinating way to understand a community, tracking the changes and developments of a few regular characters over time. It’s actually a little bit like Faulkner. But what makes Love Medicine so much better than Night Watchman, which ostensibly has the same kind of “following a community” construction as opposed to following a main character, is that the characters in Love Medicine feel so much more real and genuine. They have strengths and weaknesses that seem more like real people instead of being just vehicles for story. They fail and overcome interesting challenges, fall in love and die unexpectedly. And yet, for the stories all being so very different, there’s a unifying thread of love that does so much for the work as a whole. There’s a reason that this book was so popular when it first came out, and why it keeps getting new printings. If you only read one novel by Erdrich, make it this one. Though it actually isn’t my favorite of hers. That status would have to go to…

Tracks (1988)

Following some of the same characters of Love Medicine, but taking place around 50 or 60 years before in the 1910’s and 1920’s, Tracks expands upon characters and stories that were only briefly mentioned in Love Medicine. It features Nanapush, who is by far my favorite character out of any of Erdrich’s works, but also features the likes of Fleur Pillager, who has found a deserved reputation among literary circles as being one of the strongest, most interesting female leads in American texts. Again, it’s more a series of stories than a single narrative, but it’s so good. I wrote my final paper for class largely on this text, and that’s mostly because this is easily my top book from the semester, or at least a very close second. Well, I also wrote my paper on this one because my final paper was on water as a symbol and this book has a lot of water. There’s supernatural occurrences, unsettling Catholic fanaticism, a genuine tale of love and loss, conflicting emotions and character arcs, and so much more, packed into a book that’s half the length of the rest of Erdrich’s novels. While this is my favorite book of these eight, I’d recommend reading it after you read Love Medicine, since it reveals some pretty important character backgrounds that have significant bearing on Love Medicine, which end up being some of the most surprising reveals in any book I’ve ever read. It’s crazy.

Four Souls (2004)

Four Souls is unique in that it’s a direct sequel to Tracks. While I do think Four Souls is the weaker of the two overall, it’s still a fantastic read, and I think these books could benefit from being a single edition together. This is because, while I do think that Four Souls has less in it as far as character, it has some of my favorite scenes from any of these books. Nanapush really gets to shine in this one, as does Fleur, and the opening chapter of the text has one of the greatest descriptions of settler colonial resource exploitation ever. It’s an environmental novel without being an environmental novel, though I guess you could make that argument for Tracks, too. That’s because this novel specifically follows Fleur as she tries to take revenge on the industrialist who stole her trees. I see it as being as much about reclaiming nature as it is about Fleur reclaiming her rightful land, and it takes an interesting approach to the idea of reparations and land rights. Plus it delivers some closure to the stories started in Tracks, which is an added bonus. It’s a good one.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)

This one is… interesting. The general premise is that it follows a young Catholic priest who arrives at the reservation in order to take up the mantle of his now-deceased predecessor. This is the same reservation that Love Medicine and Tracks take place in, so we again see some of those characters, some both before their births and after their deaths. Father Damien, the priest in question, is extremely long-lived, so this book jumps in time between the 1920’s, 30’s, up to the 80’s and 90’s. There’re a lot of great scenes and character interactions, and it’s nice to see things from Father Damien’s perspective, as he was just a bit character previously. But there are two problems; one, Father Damien is white, and the Catholic church has a pretty rough history with native peoples and forced conversion. So it’s a bit hard to trust Damien’s perceptions right from the start. The other problem is that Father Damien isn’t a man; he’s actually a woman, Agnes, who finds the dead body of the real Father Damien and takes his place. She lives as a man for her entire life after that, with some exceptions. And… the novel doesn’t explore the gender question any more than that. Erdrich is kind of notorious for not really exploring the LGBT+ community and/or straight-up (unintentionally?) queer-baiting, so to have a female-born character living as a man and then not exploring the gender and transgender implications of this is weird. Erdrich said she didn’t want this novel to be about gender, but it’s so hard, and, frankly, kind of ignorant, to ignore that topic in a book that hinges almost entirely upon the dynamism of Father Damien’s gender. It isn’t an issue that impedes the book enough to be problematic, but it feels like a missed opportunity for a more inclusive community.

The Plague of Doves (2008)

This one’s a lot like Love Medicine in that it’s a series of short stories from various narrators that kind of follow a general arc, but the major difference here is that it follows an entirely different set of characters from the previous four books I talked about. It takes place on the same reservation, and there are mentions of characters from Love Medicine, but it’s largely a new world. And it’s a great book. The stories are interesting, with some coming entirely out of left field and yet still feeling natural, and the crux of the book, a brutal lynching from fifty years ago, is an example of historical tragedy in literature that feels simultaneously gut-wrenchingly real and already a thing of the book’s past, a trait that real historical lynchings tend to have. As far away in time from the lynching as the characters get, it never really leaves. It’s a specter of history that will never really fade away, nor should it, because it serves as an important reminder not just of the brutality of man but, more pointedly, the evils that humans are capable of just because of race and skin tone. It’s easy to look at lynchings of the past as historically isolated, things that used to happen but don’t anymore. But in a world where the death of unarmed black men at the hands of both police and armed civilians continue to be a systemic issue, we need to realize that the forces behind lynchings are still very much alive and powerful. The people doing the lynching may not have the white hoods anymore, but police brutality is lynching with guns. And like historical acts of violence, they keep getting away with it. So while this book is about a lynching that happened to a group of indigenous men, it’s still relevant to today because those are the kinds of historical and modern traumas that people of color have to deal with in this country. And fixing it shouldn’t be their burden to bear, although bear it they do. At any rate, the book is really good! It ties with Tracks for my top pick! Oh, and the doves it refers to are passenger pigeons, which have been extinct for years now, which is also sad.

The Round House (2012)

The Round House isn’t a direct sequel to Plague of Doves, but it follows some of the same characters ten or fifteen years after the events of Plague of Doves. But this novel is very different than the others in that it’s very much a novel, not a short story collection. There’s one narrator, a teenager named Joe, and it follows the entire arc of a single summer from start to finish as he attempts to claim justice against the man who raped his mother. It’s kind of a weird mix between Erdrich’s other works and coming-of-age stories like Stand by Me, and then adds some light detective work for good measure, but it works pretty well, for the most part. I’d say it’s a bit weaker than Plague of Doves and some of her other novels largely because it kind of drags on in the middle and there are certain plot points that show up and never really appear again. And I also feel like the last chapter was entirely unnecessary and came out of the blue, though it fits from an emotional context. But it’s a powerful book either way, and explores the emotions of the victims of sexual violence from an interesting perspective; that of a child. If a coming-of-age indigenous quasi-mystery novel doesn’t really sound like your thing, I don’t blame you. It’s different than Erdrich’s other works, and while it definitely sits neatly above Future Home and Night Watchman on my ranking, I’d probably still put it below Love Medicine, Tracks, and Plague of Doves. But I think it’s worth a read!

Well, that’s the end. The eight novels of Louise Erdrich that I read this semester. Someday, when I read more of her stuff, I might update this again or make a new post with some other novels of hers. And maybe one day I’ll post that research paper I wrote about water as a symbol in her texts, because I think it’s not too shabby. Of all these books, I do think they’re all worth reading (except for Future Home) because they’re great stories but also because of the perspectives and experiences they offer, especially to people who may not have had any real interactions, or very limited ones, with native peoples of any culture. They’re wonderful books, and I think anyone would enjoy reading them. I liked them, and if you’ve read this far, I think you will like them, too. Thanks for reading.