Louise Erdrich, Great American Novelist, Is Just Getting Started
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Alexa_McCord 22yo Dayton, Tennessee, United States
Louise Erdrich outside her bookstore, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis, on May 5, 2016.
Ackerman + Gruber
If you cannot see the Ojibwe in Louise Erdrich, perhaps that’s because two centuries of popular culture have depicted this nation’s first people as cartoons. You can hear Erdrich’s paternity in her Teutonic surname; her mother is half-French and half-Ojibwe, a group known also as Chippewa, who are among the many indigenous people on this continent collectively called Anishinaabe.
In the novel The Antelope Wife, Erdrich writes, “You make a person from a German and an Indian, for instance, and you’re creating a two-souled warrior always fighting with themself.” I met Erdrich this October in Minneapolis, at a restaurant next door to the small independent bookstore she owns, Birchbark Books. I read the quote from The Antelope Wife back to her and she laughed. “Absolutely,” she said. “I was thinking of myself.”
Over the course of 33 years, Erdrich has published 30 books: poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, stories for children, and now, with the publication this month of Future Home of the Living God, 16 novels. In that body of work, Erdrich has certainly written the Indian experience. But the reality that Edrich is a great Indian writer should not imply that she is not also a great American writer. She’s written the German immigrant experience, in The Master Butchers Singing Club. She’s written about young boys and teenage girls, elderly ladies and damaged veterans, priests and nuns, dogs and deer. To consider her only a Native artist is too narrow by far. No one talks about Jonathan Franzen as the great Midwestern Lutheran writer.
“I think as a minority writer, as a brown writer, you end up feeling — and getting thought of — as being limited, because you're only writing about your people,” the writer Sherman Alexie told me. “But Louise taught me that you could write about one town, one family, through the course of a couple dozen books, and be endless. When people ask me, ‘Why do you only write about Indians?’ my response was always, ‘Every moment of Shakespeare happens on my reservation every day.’ And it was Louise's epic stories about small places that taught me that.”
Erdrich reminds us how odd reality can be.
“Endless” is an apt word. Erdrich’s 16 novels are the heart of an astonishing achievement, one of the most impressive bodies of work by any American writer alive. Some writers are prolific; some are shape-shifters. It’s rare and intimidating to encounter one who is both. It’s further confounding when so serious an artist also manages to be entertaining — and Erdrich never fails to offer the reader that particular pleasure.
“She writes hyperrealistic literary fiction,” Alexie said. “There is murder and violence and desperation and hunger and prayer and car wrecks and love letters.” But Erdrich is also comfortable with the uncanny. In her fictional world, a disembodied head might pursue someone through the night; a violin lost for decades might drift to shore in an empty boat; a man may be unsure if he's seen a woman or a deer — indeed, the line between woman and deer may be hard to discern. Erdrich reminds us how odd reality can be.
In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.
“I think Louise decided in a very early point in her career that she would only allow the work to speak for herself,” the writer Marlon James told me, “and that’s it.”
Her latest novel, Future Home of the Living God, says a great deal. (Erdrich and I share HarperCollins as a publisher). It will be called a dystopian novel, because it is a book about unnerving changes to society, to the planet, to human evolution itself; because it’s a book that talks about end times and contains actual monsters. It conjures a world in which the persecution of pregnant women seems possible — but, of course, we already live in a world in which the government attempts to legislate biology. In many ways, Erdrich has only ever been a realist.
Future Home will also undoubtedly bring up comparisons to Margaret Atwood, whose literary speculative fiction has become newly resonant, thanks to our current political climate and some high-profile television adaptations. Erdrich began writing Future Home in 2002, making her view of the world seem uncannily prescient in a similar way, but the novel could also present a path forward.
At one point, the protagonist and narrator, Cedar, on the run from sinister government forces and locked in a basement closet for her own safety, pauses to admire an architectural detail. “I think we have survived because we love beauty and because we find each other beautiful,” she says. “I think it may be our strongest quality.”
And that might be the best way to understand Erdrich’s artistic project: as a celebration of beauty and a testament to the redemptive power of art — which, of course, includes storytelling. “In every one of the books, there has to be someone telling a story,” Erdrich said. “It’s almost a rule that I didn’t know I made for myself — someone breaks out in story. To me that’s the true essence of the work I’m doing." In LaRose, when asked for the moral of one of her long-winded stories, an elderly Indian lady says, “Moral! Our stories don’t have those.” That feels like a statement about Erdrich’s work: The only moral to be found is that telling stories is what makes us human.
“I really think that she'll win the Nobel, at some point,” the writer Ann Patchett, Erdrich’s friend and colleague, told me. I told Patchett I thought it would be an extraordinary political statement, to acknowledge a writer whose people predate this very country at a time when this country is preoccupied with defining precisely who belongs here.
“I would say it's not that,” Patchett replied. “She's the best writer. I think that it's really important not to confuse these two things, because there's no affirmative action vote with Louise. Is there anyone but Louise? I don't think there is.”
Future Home’s Cedar is Ojibwe by birth, though reared by white adoptive parents. When evolution begins to go haywire and the government cracks down on pregnant women, Cedar decides to flee her urban existence for refuge on the reservation where she was born. The novel reads like a thriller, but it is also suffused with a sense of foreboding that feels deeply personal.
“This one was written for me in some way — it was probably working over my terror over a late pregnancy,” Erdrich told me. If the author was anxious over becoming a mother again at age 46, she seems also to have tapped into the cultural anxiety, when she began writing the book in 2002, of the post-truth era of George W. Bush — a feeling distressingly relevant, again, in whatever you’d care to call the era in which we now live. That wasn’t something Erdrich expected. “I honestly didn't think I would ever publish this book,” she said. “It was so over the top.”
Erdrich writes in longhand. (This has taken its toll; a few years ago, she began signing her books using her left instead of her favored right hand.) She then transfers the manuscript into a computer, but Future Home ended up marooned inside an obsolete machine. Eventually, one of Erdrich’s daughters rescued the work and the writer returned to it after a long absence. That computer document was 500 pages; Future Home is 288. (“I had to cut hundreds of pages of Catholic inquiry,” Erdrich said.)
“It felt so important to finish and publish it now,” Erdrich told me, “because once I started reading it again, I felt like I was expressing the anxiety I have about climate change.” The October morning I spent with Erdrich was sunny and warm — an ideal summer day in late autumn, eerily bearing out her point.
“I honestly didn't think I would ever publish this book,” she said. “It was so over the top.”
“Climate chaos? I don’t know what to call it,” Erdrich said. “The change we’re going to be seeing will probably happen on such a massive scale that there’s no predicting what will happen for any one set of people or any particular part of the world.”
Pregnancy is a rich metaphor for that climate anxiety in the book: a state of waiting, a low-level thrum of worry, a wish for human well-being. The drama of Cedar eluding capture is also the drama of Cedar awaiting the birth of her child. Erdrich imbues both with surprising tension and urgency.
The fact that Future Home is both a new work and an old one complicates the task of placing it in Erdrich’s catalog. The book feels like a stylistic shift on the heels of her last two much-heralded novels, both about families coping in the aftermath of terrible tragedies — 2012’s The Round House, which won the National Book Award, and last year’s LaRose, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award — although in a sense it predates those works.
“For this book I was of course influenced by a lot of speculative and science fiction,” Erdrich said, “the books that I love that I don’t talk about much — the reading that first excited me as a young person. Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. I didn’t know that you could go to these places, you could invent things that weren’t real.”
If Erdrich credits Bradbury for this tactic — she also mentioned George Orwell and Frank Herbert — younger writers may well credit Erdrich for the very same thing: inventing what is not strictly real to access some place of hidden meaning. “There's something about the overlapping worlds inside of her novels,” the writer Karen Russell told me. “The binaries break down in her work. … Somebody's head starts rolling after you and it simply feels undeniable as written. It's not a registered shift — it’s the way that the entire world feels.”
If Erdrich is quick to acknowledge her inspirations, there’s also something sui generis about her approach. And to talk about Future Home, or any of Erdrich’s work, as belonging to a particular genre tradition — whether it’s science fiction or magical realism — feels inescapably diminishing. Still, critical reception to Erdrich has reached back into the canon to try to make sense of her. She's probably most often compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and to William Faulkner, the former for her comfort with what we might call magic, the latter for how she's explored a specific geographic territory across a large body of work.
“I'm getting tired of this,” Erdrich said, when I mentioned Faulkner to her. “It was a great compliment in the beginning. It was kind of wonderful to be compared to Faulkner, but it's over for me.” A compliment like that ends up being both a constraint and a misunderstanding; to insist that it’s a great honor borders on insult. To be fair, there really isn’t another writer like Marquez, or like Faulkner. And there may never be another writer like Erdrich.
Ackerman + Gruber
In speaking to Erdrich’s friends for this story, their praise for her was so uniform that it was hard to imagine she has any enemies. Patchett shared a story about first meeting her, during a party when Patchett was in graduate school in Iowa: “I was probably 21 or 22 at the time. Louise was such a big deal. She was just what we all dreamed of being. She was like the vision of fiction, the goddess of fiction. She came back into the kitchen, and talked to me, and was nice to me. I was the person washing the dishes. I just can't tell you how much that fills my heart with love for her. She was and is such a decent, kind, lovely human being.”
Erdrich was born in Minnesota in 1954. She is enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians (her maternal grandfather was the tribal chair), who are based in North Dakota; that state is where she was raised and is where many of her novels are set, in a fictional town called Argus. Erdrich graduated from Dartmouth in 1976, which means she was one of the first women to enter that institution.
At Dartmouth, she first met the scholar Michael Dorris, who would himself become a well-known writer. The two married in 1981. Dorris was a single father by adoption to three children; together, the couple had three more. As is almost inevitable with attractive, ambitious, talented young couples, the two became stars in the literary world.
Erdrich published her first novel, Love Medicine, in 1984; she's published a novel every two or three years since. Love Medicine is a multigenerational saga broken into a dozen or so stories. The book is elliptical, unpredictable, odd. It’s hard to remember who is who, and what connections bind characters of different generations. There is no plot, but there is story. There is no logic, but that absence feels like magic. It’s a difficult text that is mysteriously easy to read and a best-seller.
"Louise was such a big deal. She was just what we all dreamed of being."
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