~ LaRose, by Louise Erdrich ~
As with all good writing, each novel in Erdrich’s Justice trilogy can stand on its own. Set in and around a Native American reservation in North Dakota, they are loosely linked stories featuring an extended cast of Ojibwe/Chippewa Indians. The Plague of Doves (2008) describes the lynching in 1918 of three young Indians, including a thirteen-year-old boy, who were unjustly accused of murdering a white family. Most of the novel is set decades later, but the history lingers on in the lives of the community. The Round House (2012) starts with a brutal attack on an Indian woman, and wonderfully describes the traumatic year that followed in the lives of her family and community. LaRose (2016) has the fewest awards, but to my mind is the most accomplished, moving and elegant of the three novels.
Landreaux Iron is out hunting when he accidentally shoots Dusty, the 5-year-old son of his neighbours Peter and Nola Ravish. After tortured deliberation and a sweat lodge ritual, Landreaux and his wife Emmaline decide to follow an old Indian custom, and give their own 5-year-old son, LaRose, to the Ravishes to bring up as their own.
What do you want? said Peter.
They answered simply.
Our son will be your son now.
Landreaux put the small suitcase on the floor. Emmaline was shredding apart. She put the other bag down in the entry and looked away.
They had to tell him what they meant, Our son will be your son, and tell him again.
It’s the old way, said Landreaux. He said it very quickly, got the words out yet again. There was a lot more to their decision, but he could no longer speak.
Grief abounds in both households. LaRose is a mature, thoughtful child who is miserable at first, but bravely does his best to cope with the situation, despite the huge emotional burden of being the healer for both families. The Ravish family warms to him despite Nola’s intrinsic cold-heartedness and self-absorption, and their daughter Maggie’s mean streak. The large Iron family — including teenagers Willard, Josette, Snow and adopted Hollis — miss LaRose desperately. While wrapping Christmas presents
At some point, thought, everything stopped and the girls started crying. Coochy rolled his eyes and glared, then stalked out. Hollis made a strategic exit to the boys’ room. Landreaux went to work early, and Emmaline was left stirring a pot of stew. This exact thing had happened every week or so since Landreaux and Emmaline had explained to the other children what they had done.
Both sets of parents are still distraught, and Erdrich is excellent at tracing their emotions and behaviour through many stages of grief.
Tears spurted down, wetting her collar, for what was there to say about what had happened — an unsayable thing — and Emmaline did not know how she or Landreaux or anyone, especially Nola, was going to go on living.
You tried to do a good thing, said Father Travis. LaRose will understand that. He will come back to you.
LaRose is young, she said, her hungry eyes blurring. They forget if you’re not with them every day.
LaRose, it turns out, is named after an ancestor. There has been a LaRose in almost every generation of the family since the 1830s. The first LaRose was a young Indian girl whose drink-addicted mother sold her at a trading post. (Erdrich doesn’t tone down the horror, but never dwells on it either; she says just enough to let the reader fill in the rest with imagination). Regular Erdrich readers will know that her novels are non-linear, so that past is as vivid and present to her characters as the present.
Each character’s failings are laid out without moral judgement. Some of the Indians are addicted to alcohol or drugs, some hang on to old resentments forever, some are mean-spirited and ungenerous. But there is a palpable sense of community and extended family on the reservation, and memories of history going back many generations. In each novel, the central event is the cause of social ripples that extend through the community for years and decades afterwards.
People never forget around here. And they will never forget this either.
‘Justice’, on an Indian reservation, is an imperfect concept limited by complex legalities. Multiple legal systems come into play: tribal, local, and federal law may apply depending on the exact location of a crime (as in The Round House) or the identity of the victim or criminal. And of course, there is racism: for hundreds of years, the life of an Indian has been explicitly or implicitly considered less important, most recently visible in the lack of attention to the many Indian women who have vanished in the last decade.
Erdrich populates her novels with characters of all ages, ranging from the 5-year-old LaRose to the grandmothers and grandfathers who are an honoured part of the community, and have entertainingly raunchy conversations in all three novels.
While the trilogy has plenty of male characters (and in fact, the protagonist of The Round House is a fourteen-year-old boy), the women characters, especially Emmaline and her daughters, were particularly real, complicated, flawed, honest, and lively, with a shared matter-of-fact energy that belies their essential kindness.
The Iron Girls. Snow, Josette. The Iron Maidens. They were junior high volleyball queens, sister BFFs, heart-soul confidantes to each other and advice givers to their brothers. They were tight with their mom, loose with their dad. With their grandma they got bead-happy and could sew for hours.
Josette and Snow were not friends of Maggie’s, but there is now a shared connection between the two households, and it is lovely to watch the Iron boys and girls adopt Maggie as part of their family. “She’s my sister”, says Josette to another girl. The fact that Maggie is genetically almost Caucasian while the Iron children range in color from light brown to dark is irrelevant, as skin comes in all colours around the reservation.
Erdrich’s sentences are simple and unsentimental, but the descriptions are evocative, and each novel has layers of history, reservation culture, and Native American myth woven on top of the event at the core of the novel. LaRose, in particular, is a lovely read that stays with the reader long after the novel ends.
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