Looking for Louise Erdrich

Just finished Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag: early on in the novel, one character is described as “an undisciplined reader” who keeps “a mess of half-read books beside her bed, as well as on the coffee tables and in the bathrooms” who is married to someone whose “reverence for books had started with the cast-off marvels his mother had brought home. The smell of mildewed pages. The broken spine, torn, showing the cardboard. Nothing mattered but that the book be rescued like a human thing….She was a raucous, impertinent, even disrespectful reader. [He] wouldn’t dream of using a Kleenex for a bookmark. He looked at splayed books with anxiety, and always fetched a strip of paper to close gently within the pages. He seemed to think he needed a bookmark at the ready when he shut his books, the way a medic has a bandage handy to stanch a wound once he lifts away direct pressure.”

I (over)identify with both of these characters, as someone who literally can’t leave home without at least three books, maybe seven or more if I’m going away for the whole weekend, just in case I find myself with a stretch of time and realize that what I really need is some poetry/a good novel/something that I’ve already read that I can ease into reading again/a collection of essays/some scary short stories/a specific series of issues of a comic book serial from the 1990s/a guide to foraging for herbs in suburban Philadelphia, etc.

Books are a kind of anting-anting for me, yet I’ve left some precious ones on trains, in hotel rooms, on dining hall floors. I have been known to skip to the end of long novels, so I can brace myself for characters’ fates or figure out whether I should make the investment of continuing to live in the universe the writer is crafting. I do not have good boundaries when it comes to other people’s reading materials: when a much-coveted copy of The Passage entered into the household earlier in the summer, I not only would wait until the alpha reader fell asleep to steal it for my own reading pleasure, but also would let slip key plot points that were just too good to keep to myself (“there’s a newspaper report that quotes a person who is trying to reach family members in Johnstown! And it turns out that Philadelphia and its western suburbs are somehow immune from the early waves of sickness, and it is actually true that Philly girls will in fact be the ones who will survive the coming apocalypse!”)

It’s been a summer of trying to catch up with Erdrich’s prodigious output – I finally made some progress through The Master Butchers Singing Club, even while feeling slightly put out by the fact that at some point she not only wrote The Plague of Doves but also published it to great critical acclaim and I am just now realizing that the book exists. I had picked up a copy of Four Souls on the shelves of DogStar Books in Lancaster several weeks ago when I was trying to find a copy of Jane Smiley’s Moo since my own is AWOL. I had remembered taking Four Souls out from the Ludington Library last summer (which was a false memory – I actually had Four Souls on the shelves at home), and wanted to reread her description of the construction of a grand mansion that conjures the lives and landscapes that are ravaged to build the house – the ancient trees that are felled, the brownstone carved from an island that the Ojibwe hold sacred, the lead paint that poisons the family, the bricks that take their hue from blood from a slaughterhouse, the animals driven to death over the course of construction, the laborers who lose their lives in the work of the accumulation of one man’s wealth.

Reading this made me want to reread the moment in The Painted Drum in which an estates appraiser who has taken the drum from the attic of a family descended from a corrupt trader braces herself as the local sheriff breaks into her kitchen, since she (and we) believe that she is going to be arrested for theft -- as it turns out, the DEA thinks that she’s a drug runner because she had been seen hiking through a patch of marijuana planted by a ne’er do well in the neighborhood who, as it turns out, is extremely talented in his tending of plants.

I also want to go back and reread all of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse which is one of those books that I read straight through in one 24 hour period and wanted it to never end, and her travel narrative for National Geographic entitled Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country where she writes of modern day miracles such as the fact that her toddler had managed to keep a small stone in her mouth for the better part of the day, with no ill effects or tragic end, and that Erdrich herself has opened an independent bookstore in this era that seems to be so inhospitable to such ventures, places that I think maintain the life of a community.

These stories circulate with others, such as a narrative of a community that literally breaks itself apart when one member falls ill, since they’ve learned that a disease can annihilate a tribe and that the self-imposed diaspora may be the only way of ensuring that they can live on. Thinking of the ways in which our lives have been shaped by such experiences and incidents; wondering what is created and recreated when such stories are told and retold.