‘LaRose,’ by Louise Erdrich
Where the reservation boundary invisibly bisected a stand of deep brush — chokecherry, popple, stunted oak — Landreaux waited” is the first sentence of “LaRose,” Louise Erdrich’s third novel in the loose Turtle Mountains trilogy after “The Plague of Doves” and “The Round House.
[...] you may have no choice, as you fall under the spell of a master investigating invisible boundaries and perpetual bisectings.
Soon, she dives into the unending echo of another bleak and unconscionable rending — tribal children “re-educated” at Christian boarding schools, that cancerous devastation to Native cultures, families, relationships, customs, rituals, languages.
Erdrich imagines with precision the emotional truths of her characters, whether it’s an adolescent daughter who wants LaRose to “change my mom from evil, like she is now, into nice.”
(“If you can do that?” she adds — “I think they would make a TV show about you”); or an Ojibwe girl named LaRose in the 1880s, ravaged first by a sadistic fur trapper and then by tuberculosis rampant at her boarding school.
Erdrich finds the humanity in a scheming drug addict and in bawdy elders and in hostile sisters.
First it loved animals, then it loved people too.
Like Toni Morrison, like Tolstoy, like Steinbeck, Erdrich writes her characters with a helpless love and witnesses them with a supreme absence of judgment.
On the reservation, there’s no such thing as one person’s story, even as the author attends to each person’s business; each story is all stories, in a way, and the relationships cross over time and history.
On the top of a wooden door, the underside of chairs, on the shelves of the basement storage room where I was locked up once for sassing.
Number 2 lead government issue BIA pencil, in a notebook, stored now in the National Archives in Kansas City.
Yes, we wrote our name in places it would never be found until the building itself was torn down or burned so that all the sorrows and strivings those walls held went up in flame, and the smoke drifted home.