Often it seems that the most persuasive and idiosyncratic writing about a society is from those who live on its fringes. Think of Janet Frame in our own country, reviewer Oliver Riddell writes.
LAROSE
By Louise Erdrich
Corsair/Little Brown/Hachette
Louise Erdrich has been writing increasingly superior novels about her own society for decades. She is a Native American, an Ojibwe (Chippaweh) from North Dakota.
Typical Native American writers in the United States, and the same is true of First Americans in Canada, have a reputation for writing about worlds that mingle and are not easy to distinguish between.
Erdrich's worlds involve suffering, crime, guilt and redemption across generations, influenced by the issues of their time but making no moral judgements at all.
So what may begin as a picture of current issues and events transforms into a picture of how a society is warped over more than a century by the pressures brought to bear from unrestrained violent conquest in some of the most inhospitable climate and terrain on the planet. That is North Dakota.
I once spent a midwinter weekend there. It is not a place anyone would choose to live in. It is what the Chippaweh were herded into after they lost the Indian Wars. The term "reservation'' does not begin to describe it.
That is the background of Erdrich's critically acclaimed work.
"LaRose'' is a name that keeps reoccurring in a network of families. There are not many experiences they do not have.
And, as with Erdrich's other novels, some storylines and anecdotes have endings while others do not. That can irritate the reader, or leave them wanting more. There may be subsequent novels about LaRose.
A defeated people can turn to mysticism and that is what Erdrich's people have done. There are those who dismiss this as "hocus pocus'' and her books are not for them. To disrespect an entire people's coping mechanism is self-defeating and is to miss so much.
Like other Native American peoples, the Chippaweh were overrun.
The pain and trauma of that is the basis of LaRose.
Erdrich offers her people the choice between education and extermination.
Others have turned to the bottle for comfort; some turned to violent crime. Various religions have flourished. All this may sound familiar to New Zealand readers.
Life among the Chippaweh can be complicated, which is the stuff of good fiction.
A synopsis of the plot would serve no purpose. It would read like a television soap opera, and would entirely miss the point of what makes Erdrich so special, her use of language.
Moving between the real world and a spiritual world requires a special language, and she is in absolute command of it.
- Oliver Riddell is a retired journalist in Wellington.
