The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

The Barnes & Noble Review

Pluto is a good name for a town in rural North Dakota: small, cold, remote. The fictional town in Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves is not out of place in a state where towns like Bonetrail, Zap, and Wing have been losing population since the 1950s while others have crumbled into husks, eaten by the prairie wind.

My Norwegian-American grandparents, who lived in Fargo, would take us children on long drives across the plains. My grandmother’s favorite town was Ayr, and I remember when the number of inhabitants on Ayr’s highway sign declined to less than ten. "Poor Ayr," my grandmother said. In Doves, "the dead of Pluto outnumber the living."

As a Dakotan exile, I have always been drawn to Erdrich’s writing because of my father’s side of the family, German Chippewas in Grand Forks. Erdrich’s North Dakota Chippewa novels, written out of homesickness when she lived in New Hampshire, affirm my sense of home. She accurately captures the laconically judgmental wit of people living in a spacious, indomitable land. In Doves, she describes astounding, capricious storms, a winter sunrise "so immediate, so gorgeous, so grim" and the very soil: "rich, black clods you felt like holding in your fist and biting."

In Erdrich’s signature meta-narrative style that spirals through past and present time, the repercussions of the unsolved murder of a farm family in 1911 echo through the life of every character in Pluto. One of the central narrators, Evelina Harp, is 12 in the 1960s when her grandfather Mooshum tells her about a second crime, a harrowing tragedy of vigilante injustice in reaction to the murders. Her gradual discovery of Mooshum’s role in these events changes the way she feels about her grandfather, and everyone she knows.

Doves, Erdrich’s 11th novel, is a departure from the rest, as it does not involve any characters from the earlier books. The location of the reservation and its distrustful relationship with border towns is familiar, and although she understandably insists that the reservation depicted is not Turtle Mountain, where she is enrolled, the details are telling.

Mooshum is Michif, a term for mixed-blood Chippewa or Cree people used in North Dakota (it’s Métis in Canada). He’s old enough to remember the history of the reservation and carries some of the tribe’s cultural traditions, such as storytelling and priest baiting. Much of the humor in the novel comes from Mooshum, whether it’s wisecracks or Wile E. Coyotesque shenanigans.

His real name is Seraph Milk. The families in this story have ethereal-sounding names: Harp, Milk, Peace, reflecting complex religious ironies. Rather than being forcibly converted, Erdrich’s Chippewa characters have assimilated Catholic images within their indigenous passions and mysteries.

The plague of doves, a mysterious event that fades, disappointingly without elaboration, was experienced by Mooshum in 1896. Were the doves messengers of the biblical Holy Ghost, or like the buffalo, who also massed and disappeared, representatives of a more Chippewa heaven? A clue may be that these doves were not white. In perhaps the most sensual image in a novel packed with transcendent erotic scenes, Mooshum stands "[i]n delight, watching the women’s naked, round, brown legs thrash forward" through a sea of murmuring brown doves.

Sex and spirituality vie for people’s souls and sanity, but sexuality is more often a healer, celebrating the spirit in the flesh, while religion is a delusional drug. With biting satire and occasional caricature verging on the grotesque, Erdrich sends up hypocritical clergy, charismatic Christian cults and the snake-handling, speaking-in-tongues supernaturalism of non-Indian characters. Meanwhile, the Michif preacher Billy Peace mesmerizes his white flock out of their assets: "The Antichrist is among us / He is the plastic in our wallets."

In contrast, Erdrich's native characters are not stereotypically mystical Indians shape-shifting in the bush. Nor are they casino-rich, conniving politicians. Evelina notes, "We are a tribe of office workers, bank tellers, book readers and bureaucrats."

Still, there is subtle spiritual power in this story. There is a violin that takes a magical journey and bees that enact sweet revenge on a developer, and the notion of progress itself: "The swarm had left the rubble and built their houses beneath the earth. They were busy in the graveyard right now, filling the skulls with white combs and coffins with black honey."

Mooshum’s trickster storytelling reflects the flexible Anishinaabe (Chippewa/Ojibwe) oral tradition, the rich specificity of the Ojibwemowin language and the local Michif dialect, a pungent mix of Cree verbs and French nouns. One of Mooshum’s characters, Liver Eater, invokes both the ancient cannibal manito Windigo and possibly the evil spirit of alcohol, Mooshum’s affliction. Later he plays with the idea of a hungry story, a story so alive it devours its audience, and several of Doves’ characters have voracious appetites for reading.

In a refreshing take on native identity, the young Evelina wants to be seen as French. She has a crush on Paris, and her adventures are driven by her obsessions: with her cousin, with her teacher (a nun), and with Anaïs Nin. An affair with an unstable androgynous woman leads her to contemplate coming out as a lesbian, not an easy decision in rural North Dakota.

Erdrich has focused on gender fluidity in other novels; however, it is another theme, dispossession, that brings Evelina to a more complete understanding of herself as native: "I saw the loss of the land was wedged inside of them forever. This loss would enter me too." For native people, loss is leavened by survival, as another Michif character, Judge Antone Coutts, explains, "The old tribal relationship to the land in dreams and intimate knowledge called love is why they still exist as tribes."

When Evelina’s voice falters, it is due to the structure of the novel. Doves is constructed around previously published short stories. "The Reptile Garden" and "Shamengwa" are beautifully interwoven to mesh with the larger piece. Marn Wolde’s story is overwhelming in its power but takes the reader frustratingly far away from the main characters. "Come In" is narrated by a minor character, and distracting in its provenance. While Evelina becomes captivating in "Sister Godzilla," her voice is detached and didactic in the opening scenes when she looks back in time at her oddly calculating child self or gives a lesson in Métis history. When she reports that a character in one of Mooshum’s stories actually existed, and names the source text, it’s unclear who did the research, the character or the author. Evelina’s authority is not explained, and therefore hard to trust. Similarly, a latecomer character, who unveils a chilling twist, concludes the novel with an unconvincing conceit that it was written as a newsletter for the Pluto historical society.

Doves is a challenging read that would be more accessible if an Ojibwe/Michif glossary and family tree charts were included. It’s necessary to flip back to see who’s who, and when (there are three characters named Joseph). I was repeatedly haunted by a strong image Erdrich created in the chapter about the first surveyors of Pluto’s town site, who set out in the dead of winter. Among their provisions is a thick wool quilt, pieced by Icelandic women, and large enough to cover nine men and a dog. I kept wondering if the novel’s concept would expand to cover all the characters and substories within it. In The Plague of Doves, although some of the edges are flapping, the center holds. --Shannon Rothenberger Flynn

Shannon Rothenberger Flynn is an author of nonfiction on Native American subjects. She is writing a novel.

From the Publisher

The unsolved murder of a farm family still haunts the white small town of Pluto, North Dakota, generations after the vengeance exacted and the distortions of fact transformed the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation.

Part Ojibwe, part white, Evelina Harp is an ambitious young girl prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina's grandfather, is a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. And Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who bears witness, understands the weight of historical injustice better than anyone. Through the distinct and winning voices of three unforgettable narrators, the collective stories of two interwoven communities ultimately come together to reveal a final wrenching truth.

The New York Times Book Review - Bruce Barcott

In A Plague of Doves, Erdrich has created an often gorgeous, sometimes maddeningly opaque portrait of a community strangled by its own history. Pluto is one of those places we read about now and then when big-city papers run features about the death of small-town America. When you grow up in such a place, people know that your mother was a wild child back in high school. They know why your uncle talks to himself in the grocery store. What Erdrich knows is that this history, built up over generations, yields a kind of claustrophobia that has only one cure: Leave.

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

What marks these stories—some of which appeared in the New Yorker and the Atlantic—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. When Mooshum isn't leading Eve through the history of her family, he's daring the local Catholic priest to save him or pursuing alcohol and romance with dogged, hilarious determination. Some of the funniest moments take place during a funeral, and even the murders and lynchings that bleed so much heartache are heightened by incongruous notes of humor.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Writing in prose that combines the magical sleight of hand of Gabriel Garcia Marquez 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…her storytelling here is supple and assured, easily navigating the wavering line between a recognizable, psychological world and the more arcane world of legend and fable…arguably her most ambitious—and in many ways, her most deeply affecting—work yet.

Publishers Weekly

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 family's infant daughter is spared, and a posse forms, incorrectly blames three Indians and lynches them. One, Mooshum Milk, miraculously survives. Over the next century, descendants of both the hanged men and the lynch mob develop relationships that become deeply entangled, and their disparate stories are held together via principal narrator Evelina, Mooshum Milk's granddaughter, who comes of age on an Indian reservation near Pluto in the 1960s and '70s and forms two fateful adolescent crushes: one on bad-boy schoolmate Corwin Peace and one on a nun. Though Evelina doesn't know it, both are descendants of lynch mob members. 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. (May)

Susanne Wells <P>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. - School Library Journal

Erdrich adds more layers of history to her community centered on an Ojibwe reservation in rural North Dakota, and as her loyal readers understand, she is going to make us work for it. This latest novel (after The Game of Silence, a novel for children) begins with a mysterious killing. As the people of the town of Pluto get the chance to tell their stories, they are attempting to reconcile the tangible with the spiritual, the native with the Eurocentric, and the reason behind the murders is hidden within the struggle. Be it the power of nature, the power of the holy, or the power of one's ancestry, the people that populate these linked tales are at the mercy of unseen forces. Erdrich's stories require our patience, as we are offered bits and scraps that we must somehow arrange in order to get to the sum of their parts. She gives us credit for being smart enough to see the big picture, and the end result is always worth the effort. This work serves to bolster her body of work, and we are fortunate that such a gifted storyteller continues to focus her gaze on this region of the continent. Highly recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ1/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

The latest Erdrich novel (The Painted Drum, 2005, etc.) 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. In the 1960s, Evelina Harp's Ojibwe grandfather, Mooshum, tells mesmerizing stories of his past. Having found a murdered family and saved the surviving baby, Mooshum and three Ojibwe friends were blamed for the killings and lynched by a mob of local whites in 1911. For reasons not immediately apparent, Mooshum was spared at the last moment, but his friends died. Evelina's first boyfriend is Corwin Peace, whose ancestor was one of those lynched. Her favorite teacher, a nun, descends from one of the mob leaders. And Evelina's middle-class parents of mixed heritage straddle the two cultures. Aunt Neve Harp sent her banker husband, who is Corwin's father, to prison after he arranged Neve's kidnapping by Corwin's then teenage uncle Billy in a phony ransom subplot (a little reminiscent of the movie Fargo). Spiritual Billy evolves into the tyrannical leader of a religious cult until his wife Marn Wolde, the daughter of farmers whose land he's taken over, kills him to save her children. While in college Evelina ends up briefly in a mental hospital where she gets to know Marn's lunatic uncle Warren. Corwin, under the positive influence of Judge Coutts and his new wife, Evelina's Aunt Geraldine, becomes a musician playing the same violin that once belonged to his ancestors. Judge Coutts's previous lover Cordelia, an older woman and a doctor who won't treat Indians, was once saved by Mooshum and his friends. 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. A lush, multilayered book. Agent: Andrew Wylie/The Wylie Agency

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Chapter One

The Plague of Doves

In the year 1896, my great-uncle, one of the first Catholic priests of aboriginal blood, put the call out to his parishioners that they should gather at Saint Joseph's wearing scapulars and holding missals. From that place they would proceed to walk the fields in a long, sweeping row, and with each step loudly pray away the doves. His human flock had taken up the plow and farmed among German and Norwegian settlers. Those people, unlike the French who mingled with my ancestors, took little interest in the women native to the land and did not intermarry. In fact, the Norwegians disregarded everybody but themselves and were quite clannish. But the doves ate their crops the same.

When the birds descended, both Indians and whites set up great bonfires and tried driving them into nets. The doves ate the wheat seedlings and the rye and started on the corn. They ate the sprouts of new flowers and the buds of apples and the tough leaves of oak trees and even last year's chaff. The doves were plump, and delicious smoked, but one could wring the necks of hundreds or thousands and effect no visible diminishment of their number. The pole-and-mud houses of the mixed-bloods and the bark huts of the blanket Indians were crushed by the weight of the birds. They were roasted, burnt, baked up in pies, stewed, salted down in barrels, or clubbed dead with sticks and left to rot. But the dead only fed the living and each morning when the people woke it was to the scraping and beating of wings, the murmurous susurration, the awful cooing babble, and the sight, to those who still possessed intactwindows, of the curious and gentle faces of those creatures.

My great-uncle had hastily constructed crisscrossed racks of sticks to protect the glass in what, with grand intent, was called the rectory. In a corner of that one-room cabin, his younger brother, whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom, slept on a pallet of fir boughs and a mattress stuffed with grass. This was the softest bed he'd ever lain in and the boy did not want to leave it, but my great-uncle thrust choirboy vestments at him and told him to polish up the candelabra that he would bear in the procession.

This boy was to become my mother's father, my Mooshum. Seraph Milk was his given name, and since he lived to be over one hundred, I was present and about eleven years old during the time he told and retold the story of the most momentous day of his life, which began with this attempt to vanquish the plague of doves. He sat on a hard chair, between our first television and the small alcove of bookshelves set into the wall of our government-owned house on the Bureau of Indian Affairs reservation tract. Mooshum would tell us he could hear the scratching of the doves' feet as they climbed all over the screens of sticks that his brother had made. He dreaded the trip to the out-house, where many of the birds had gotten mired in the filth beneath the hole and set up a screeching clamor of despair that drew their kind to throw themselves against the hut in rescue attempts. Yet he did not dare relieve himself anywhere else. So through flurries of wings, shuffling so as not to step on their feet or backs, he made his way to the out-house and completed his necessary actions with his eyes shut. Leaving, he tied the door closed so that no other doves would be trapped.

The out-house drama, always the first in the momentous day, was filled with the sort of detail that my brother and I found interesting. The out-house, well-known to us although we now had plumbing, and the horror of the birds' death by excrement, as well as other features of the story's beginning, gripped our attention. Mooshum was our favorite indoor entertainment, next to the television. But our father had removed the television's knobs and hidden them. Although we made constant efforts, we never found the knobs and came to believe that he carried them upon his person at all times. So we listened to our Mooshum instead. While he talked, we sat on kitchen chairs and twisted our hair. Our mother had given him a red coffee can for spitting snoose. He wore soft, worn, green Sears work clothes, a pair of battered brown lace-up boots, and a twill cap, even in the house. His eyes shone from slits cut deep into his face. The upper half of his left ear was missing, giving him a lopsided look. He was hunched and dried out, with random wisps of white hair down his ears and neck. From time to time, as he spoke, we glimpsed the murky scraggle of his teeth. Still, such was his conviction in the telling of this story that it wasn't hard at all to imagine him at twelve.

His big brother put on his vestments, the best he had, hand-me-downs from a Minneapolis parish. As real incense was impossible to obtain, he prepared the censer by stuffing it with dry sage rolled up in balls. There was an iron hand pump and a sink in the cabin, and Mooshum's brother, or half brother, Father Severine Milk, wet a comb and slicked back his hair and then his little brother's hair. The church was a large cabin just across the yard, and wagons had been pulling up for the last hour or so. Now the people were in the church and the yard was full of the parked wagons, each with a dog or two tied in the box to keep the birds and their droppings off the piled hay where people would sit. The constant movement of the birds made some of the horses skittish. Many wore blinders and were further . . .