The Plague of Doves

The massacre occurs on a farm near Pluto, North Dakota. Only an infant daughter survives. The white community is outraged and in a fevered pitch, a posse acting more like a mob search for Ojibwe Indians whom they blame for the horrific incident. When the posse finds several Indians, they hold them responsible without evidence and hang them; one of them Seraph "Mooshum" Milk survives. Over the next few decades, the families involved in the lynching incident intermingle. Mooshum's granddaughter Evelina Harp is raised on a nearby reservation in the1 960s and 1970s. As a teen she falls for bad-boy Corwin Peace and is friendly with a nun, who unbeknownst to her is descendents of the lynch mob; in fact she is too as part of her family come from that vigilante mob. Evelina attends college and work at a mental asylum Corwin becomes a felon. In some ways this excellent story is a series of vignettes that are told in a non-linear manner; a technique that adds depth to what happened in 1911 and how by the 1970s the descendants of those involved in the two murderous incidents have intertwining lives. The complex story line is made even more complex by the many fully developed and important characters although Evelina as the narrator keeps the plot sort of focused. This is a winner as fans learn through a lot of seemingly irrelevant and apparently unrelated clues the truth of that tragic year once the big picture becomes complete. Louise Erdrich is at the top of her game with this terrific tale. Harriet Klausner

A violin that seemingly causes the inadvertent death of one brother in the Peace family at the hands of another magically calls out to its next owner, an Ojibwe Indian named Shamengwa, after drifting about a lake in an empty canoe for twenty years, only to return to the modern-day Peace family via theft. A man quietly evolves his stamp collecting to include "disaster stamps," that is, stamps on letters associated with tragedies such as the Titanic. A locust-like invasion of white doves in 1896 accidentally brings together Seraph Milk, known now as Mooshum, with his life's love, Junesse, to form the family line of the young Evelina Harp, part white and part Ojibwe. A violin recording that reaches a "strange sweetness" lulls a crying infant to sleep and perhaps saves her life amidst a horrific family slaughter. Many years later, a violin once again exacts a form of revenge on that infant's family's murderer. Louise Erdrich brings together the great silent expanses of the northern plains, the uneasy truce between White and Native Americans, and a touch of pantheistic, tribal mysticism to tell the story of three generations' residents in the unlikely town of Pluto, North Dakota. Ostensibly named before the planet Pluto was discovered, this Pluto nevertheless contains elements of both the mythological Greek underworld and the end of the solar system. If the end of the world (North Dakota) can have its own, slowly dying end of the world, Pluto is it. The 1911 tragedy that left behind the surviving infant involved a brutal family slaying of a farm family - parents, a teenage girl, and her two younger brothers. In a racially-charged act of vigilante justice, three Indian men and a young boy who happened upon the murder scene several days later are hanged by a gang of white men. Miraculously, the boy survives the hanging. These twin acts of violence, set against the arbitrariness of Pluto's founding and the harshness of prairie life at a reservation's edge, create the stage upon which the town's Twentieth Century lives are played out in a context surpassingly unaffected by the rest of Twentieth Century history. The balance of Erdrich's story chronicles the circuitous and complex interplay of white and Indian lives in the generations since those early days. Even as the vitality of their town fades away, the residents of Pluto live out their lives beneath the unsettling racist overhang of those unresolved murders and the subsequent "rough justice" meted out by whites to an innocent group of Ojibwes. Despite these faint currents of unease, family lines cross, races intermarry, and the descendants of victims intermingle with the descendants of victimizers. Erdrich tells her story through multiple voices, predominantly those of the modern-day adolescent Evelina Harp and her uncle by marriage, Judge Antone Bazil Coutts. Their stories are interrupted by that of Marn Wolde, whose bizarre marriage to the cult-like Billy Peace forms one of the novel's stra

I've been reading Ms. Erdrich for over 20 years now, and each time I pick up one of her books, I am amazed how consistent she is in her talent. As I've said in other reviews, she's created her own Yoknapatawpha County in North Dakota, peopled with her mixed ancestors, and continues to delight. The beautiful review above from the Washington Post lays out the story without any spoilers. Erdrich creates haunting novels woven together of seemingly disparate stories that coalese in the end to make a satisfying whole. Almost a web of short stories, but each involving and intriguing in its own right, necessary to the integrated whole.

This is a beautifully-written work, poignant and evocative, about a deeply rural community in North Dakota. In ways it's almost like a Greek tragedy, with the weaving, measuring, and cutting of the threads by Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Many books try to introduce a lot of characters and tie their fates together--as in a plane crash (rarely effective) or in, say, Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey (done effectively). Plague of Doves is more like Wilder's novel: the threads are woven together with a masterful skill--everything fits and makes perfect sense. You get about 10 different narrators, although some appear only briefly. The story spans over a hundred years, and involves the murder of a family, a retaliatory lynching, and how those stories interact with the current-day narrators. Much of the book is about the interrelationships of the whites, the Indians, and the Metis (mixed-breed Indian/white): there are stories about the 1885 Northwest Rebellion and Louis Riel. One of the main characters is supposedly named after Riel's girlfriend. This happened long ago--but it isn't remote. Some of the narration is by old Indians, and their parents or grandparents were deeply involved in the events of 1885 and the murders and lynching in 1911. The title of the book also comes from such a narration--it refers to a time where passenger pigeons were like a plague of giant locusts: it adds an almost surreal element to the story. You'll find yourself swept along, both forwards and backwards in time, from the late 1800s to the present, and everything intertwines and interlocks in a truly lyrical manner. This is storytelling at its best!

When Seraph Milk, known as Mooshum to his young granddaughter Evelina, haltingly tells her about a brutal 1911 crime in which he was involved, he reveals the underlying horrors which unite and divide all the families she knows. Mooshum was one of four Ojibwe Indians from Pluto, North Dakota, who were captured and strung up for the gruesome murder of the Lochrens, a white family. Only Mooshum, among the Indians captured in the area immediately after the murders, miraculously survived the vigilante hangings, and while, ironically, only an infant daughter of the Lochrens, overlooked by the murderer or murderers, survived the massacre. The murder and lynching reverberate through the relationships within both the Indian and white communities over almost one hundred years. Erdrich is at her best here, telling overlapping family stories--horrifying, loving, hilarious, mystical, passionate, lyrical, and thoughtful--as she reveals life in the Native American and white communities from multiple points of view, across time. As the characters evolve, Erdrich reveals her major theme--the diminishing hold the distant past has on successive generations as each generation creates and feeds on its own past. The influx of white residents to Pluto, numerous intermarriages, and the influence of Christian priests, among other effects, all reduce the emphasis on shared Native American values. Filling her novel with vibrant characters who reveal their lives and stories--and often cast new light on old stories--Erdrich creates a kaleidoscope of swirling images and moods, filled with irony. The drama of the murder and hangings shares time and space with hilarious scenes in which Mooshum and his unregenerate friends taunt the local priest. Ironically, other members of his family consider becoming priests. Evelina, the third generation, looks for answers, not in religion, but in psychology and love. Another young man Evelina's age becomes an evangelical preacher with a large commune and a snake-handling wife. Though the past and tradition exert their influence, they become less important to subsequent generations, who look toward the future, and by the end of the novel, "the dead of Pluto now outnumber the living." Though some of Erdrich's character sketches and stories end rather abruptly, perhaps that, too, is part of the thematic structure--in real life such stories also end abruptly, as times and people change. With a far greater emphasis on characters and their stories than we have seen in Erdrich's most recent, more plot-based novels, and with a grand canopy of theme overarching all, this novel is a triumph--big, broad, thoughtful, and ultimately, important. n Mary Whipple The Painted Drum: A Novel (P.S.) The Master Butchers Singing Club (P.S.) The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse: A Novel The Beet Queen: A Novel (P.S.) The Porcupine Year