As she’s done so many times before, Ms. Erdrich uses several characters to narrate alternating chapters (the same technique pioneered by Faulkner in As I Lay Dying), giving us a choral story that unfolds from multiple perspectives. Only gradually are the relationships between these characters and their ancestors revealed, resulting in an elliptical, jigsaw puzzle of a narrative that italicizes the hold that time past exerts over time present … Writing in prose that combines the magical sleight of hand of Gabriel García Márquez with the earthy, American rhythms of Faulkner, Ms. Erdrich traces the connections between these characters and their many friends and relatives with sympathy, humor and the unsentimental ardor of a writer who sees that the tragedy and comedy in her people’s lives are ineluctably commingled … She has written what is arguably her most ambitious — and in many ways, her most deeply affecting — work yet.
In The Plague of Doves, Erdrich returns to familiar territory, the stark plains of North Dakota, where the little town of Pluto sits beside rusting railroad tracks, slowly dying. What’s killing it? Old grudges, lack of opportunity, long-haul trucking, modernity itself … The tension between Indians and whites in The Plague of Doves is both historical and geographical. Pluto is next to the reservation, and some say the town fathers stole tribal land. That’s minor, though, compared with the real stain on Pluto’s reputation: ‘In 1911, five members of a family — parents, a teenage girl, and an 8- and a 4-year-old boy — were murdered,’ one of the narrators recalls … The question of who really murdered that farm family adds suspense to the plot, but deeper, more satisfying discoveries arrive with the slow unspooling of the community’s bloodlines, with their rich and complex romantic entanglements.
The Plague of Doves is a multi-generational novel-in-stories of the intertwined lives of the whites in the town of Pluto, N.D., and the Native Americans and mixed-blood Metis people of French ancestry who live on the reservation surrounding it. Moving back and forth in time, four narrators take turns uncovering layer after layer of past and present … Erdrich moves seamlessly from grief to sexual ecstasy, from comedy (Mooshum's proof of the nonexistence of hell is priceless) to tragedy, from richly layered observations of nature and human nature to magical realism. She is less storyteller than medium. One has the sense that voices and events pour into her and reemerge with crackling intensity, as keening music trembling between sorrow and joy.
The story in question, the novel’s dark heart, is that of the murder of an entire white family, the Lochrens, on their farm in 1911; and of the discovery of their bodies, along with one surviving infant girl, by a group of four Native Americans … The effects of this long-ago incident pervade the novel; but The Plague of Doves is not a single, simple story. (It is worth noting that many portions of the book were originally published as short stories, primarily in The New Yorker: each section stands on its own as a consistent whole; and the triumph of the novel is the way in which Erdrich has contrived to make their unfolding as a cohesive novel seem wholly organic.) Most, like Evelina’s own, are stories of passion, of love and its consequences … There is a symphonic achievement in Erdrich’s capacity to bring so many disparate stories to life, and to have their thematic echoes overlap in such compelling harmony.
Following the form Erdrich developed in her first novel, Love Medicine, other narrators take over parts of this book, either shading events Eve understands only vaguely or adding whole new branches to the community's history. Some of these discontinuous episodes — from the arrival of white settlers to the social problems of the 1970s — relate tangentially to each other, but the connections among many parts of the novel are invisible until much later … What marks these stories...is what has always set Erdrich apart and made her work seem miraculous: the jostling of pathos and comedy, tragedy and slapstick in a peculiar dance. As horrific as the crimes at the heart of this novel are, other sections remind us that Erdrich is a great comic writer.
Evelina's is the first voice we hear in a novel that is told through a Faulknerian motet. A modern young woman who reads Camus in French, she is none the less brought up on the fairy tales of her Native American ancestors. Her narrative begins with an account of her puberty in which the teenage blends with the mythical … We are helped along by the book's quirky humour that comes through cameo characters who are too singular to be caricatures … This is not magic realism; it is so grounded in the detail of the everyday that we are barely aware that Erdrich is tugging at the seams of the realistically possible.
Her accomplishment in these pages is Tolstoy-like: to render human particularity so meticulously and with such fierce passion as to convey the great, glittering movement of time … The 1911 event acts as a guide wire for the stories to come, and also as a carrot: Our need to know compels us forward. As the stories unfold, we learn that three innocent Indians who happen onto the property afterward are immediately blamed for the murders and lynched by a vigilante posse - one of the most excruciating scenes, among many, in the novel … Though the novel's last third feels somewhat sidetracked, as if straining to continually exceed its own five-alarm intensity, the final pages sweep us back, like a song's refrain, into the original spell. The Plague of Doves propels its ripe, round, multigenerational characters to a satisfying if rather chilling finish.
As is often the case with Erdrich's writings, comic and tragic get tangled together. One of the funniest scenes is a funeral. But underlying it all is a deep sadness … Figuring out how each segment fits into the underlying puzzle is just one of the novel's pleasures. Many lives in Pluto are shaped by the dark incidents of the past, but it's most confusing for those like Evelina, who are descended from both the killers and the victims.
Stories within stories, just as the past exists inside the present. Stories told by their characters — to each other, to themselves — until storytelling becomes a form of communion that uses language to transcend language. In its structure The Plague of Doves — not really a novel but a collection of linked stories — embodies this idea … Erdrich's ear is as sharp as her eye. Her diction runs the gamut from ‘fixy’ through ‘opinionate’ to ‘prognathic’ and ‘aspergillum.’ Her characters' voices — whether narrating, arguing, grieving, or just chewing the fat — are as distinct and evocative as the varied instruments of a full orchestra … The stories told by her characters offer pleasures of language, of humor, of sheer narrative momentum, that shine even in the darkest moments of the book. Perhaps these pleasures cannot exist without the darkness, just as the present cannot exist without the past.
The massacre and the hangings, which take place near Pluto, N.D., in 1911, wend their way through this masterfully told story that braids together the lives of a handful of people soldered by family and town history to the century-old crimes … This is not a detective story but the languid unraveling of a till-now-never-solved crime, the memory of which is carried through — and haunts — succeeding generations … Erdrich offers these remembrances and stories in the form of a book, but they share the style and sensibility of the oral traditions of past centuries.
We are catapulted into a scene in which blood darkens the dust and splatters the walls after a horrific mass murder in rural North Dakota. With one gruesome, arresting paragraph, Erdrich has us hooked … The Plague of Doves is a representational fictional slice of American history, that grand garbled story in which good and evil, guilt and innocence, love and hate have become tangled up in events and genealogies. Beautifully written and frankly far more arresting than Erdrich's past two novels, it succeeds as a quintessential American story more than it does as a whodunit, page-turner though it is.
Louise Erdrich revisits the harsh and many-storied land that has figured so prominently in her novels and short stories, a place where early would-be settlers face the most hostile conditions imaginable...But those natural terrors are only the backdrop to Erdrich's absorbing, sometimes horrifying story. It is human beings in their madness, fear and vengeance that create the real horror … Erdrich tells her story, or rather her skein of tightly interwoven stories, in flashbacks and in the voices of various characters, as each strand, like the ropes with which the three innocent Indians were hanged, loops back on itself. It is as if in the grim psychological landscape these people inhabit, the past remains utterly present.
The latest Erdrich novel about the Ojibwes and the whites they live among in North Dakota spirals around a terrible multiple murder that reverberates down through generations of a community … Guilt and redemption pepper these self-sufficient, intertwining stories, and readers who can keep track of the characters will find their efforts rewarded. The magic lies in the details of Erdrich’s ever-replenishing mythology, whether of a lost stamp collection or a boy’s salvation.
Erdrich's 13th novel, a multigenerational tour de force of sin, redemption, murder and vengeance, finds its roots in the 1911 slaughter of a farming family near Pluto, N.Dak … The plot splinters as Evelina enrolls in college and finds work at a mental asylum; Corwin spirals into a life of crime; and a long-lost violin (its backstory is another beautiful piece of the mosaic) takes on massive significance. Erdrich plays individual narratives off one another, dropping apparently insignificant clues that build to head-slapping revelations as fates intertwine and the person responsible for the 1911 killing is identified.
