Little Lad - The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich
The first in a new series, devoid of schedule, where i lead you through a book i recently read
My physical copy of Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich has a family tree in the front, damn near the first thing you see when you open it. It’s a special edition with an interview with Louise in the back that was clearly required by the publisher to justify the new edition (she seems very much not interested in the interview and I love that). My digital copy of The Plague of Doves does not have a family tree in the beginning. Now, reading any Louise Erdrich novel, you’ll know immediately why that is important. These books are full of names, full of relationships that jumble together and infest your brain with implications and histories that are nearly impossible to keep track of. Reading Love Medicine for the first time a few years ago for Chris Merkner’s American Literature course (I love him and that course) saw me flipping back and forth between the family tree and the text, trying to puzzle together how these characters fit together and why that mattered in this first place. Reading The Plague of Doves, I didn’t have anything to flip back or forward to and I was just engrossed by the text, desperate to keep the names and relationships clear in my mind. It was like The Sound and the Fury all over again, just more enjoyable and making more sense.
Now, with all this said, I want to say that none of this is a negative in any semblance of the word. The barrage of identities is what makes a Louise Erdrich novel so fucking good – the books mirror a life with all the messy and complicated relationships as they get tossed together by a careless god. There is no better exercise in empathy than reading one of her books and I don’t think a literary life can be considered lived without ingesting the deeply distant and cutting words printed on those pages.
The Plague of Doves is anchored in a trauma, one that we barely get to see but whose ramifications we get uncomfortably close to. In fact, we never truly get to actually live that trauma, just watch other people survive it or not. This distance from trauma is where Erdrich’s power as an author truly lives. She is willing and brave enough to understand that sometimes the trauma itself deserves only a chapter or two at the end where it is old and tired while the rest of the books holds our hand a bit too tightly and explains to us that the trauma, at some undetermined point, disappears from view and ceases to be just a trauma or even the trauma. We feel pain as a reader, but it’s the long, hidden pain of a community ravaged by a night of searing torture.
Erdrich is my favourite writer for so many reasons, this understanding of traumatic writing only one of them, and I can not recommend this book enough. Don’t look up a family tree, which are readily available on the internet, and don’t take notes as you read. Meet the book as you would real life, with an understanding that you won’t ever have a full grasp on the society but that you’ll know what’s important anyway. The names will eventually engrave themselves on the parts of your brain they need to be written on and you won’t have to think about it. You’ll just feel their pain and know why it’s important and why she discovered she’s a lesbian.