The first chapter of LaROSE is one of the most arresting, perfectly crafted opening chapters I have encountered in a long time. It is 1999. Landreaux Iron, an Ojibwe Indian living on a reservation in North Dakota, goes hunting for a buck he had been tracking all summer. He finds it where the reservation abuts a cornfield of Peter Ravich, his neighbor and his best friend. "Landreaux took the shot with fluid confidence." But someone, somehow -- horribly -- intervened. Between Landreaux and the buck was Peter Ravich's six-year-old son Dusty, perched in a tree, also looking at the buck. The bullet struck and killed him. The Ravich family is devastated. Peter is on the brink of killing Landreaux, even though they are best friends; Nola, Dusty's mother, emotionally fragile to begin with, becomes suicidal. Although the police investigation exonerates Landreaux, he is racked by guilt; his wife Emmaline, who is Nola Ravich's half-sister, is also torn up. To address their grief and as a gesture of compensation, they give their youngest son, LaRose (who had been Dusty's frequent playmate) to the Raviches to replace Dusty.
The novel then tracks the Iron and Ravich families over the next four years, as they try to adjust to and live with the horrendous event. Over time, they end up sharing LaRose, who turns out to be preternaturally good, mature, and understanding. Much of the novel is devoted to the teenage daughters of the two families -- Snow and Josette Iron and Maggie Ravich. They become a tight trio playing on the reservation high school volleyball team, and their adolescent hijinks and sparkling repartee frequently warm the heart or evoke a smile. The story includes other characters from the reservation, two of whom assume major roles: Father Travis Wozniak, an ex-Marine and survivor of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, who operates as a strict but compassionate moral conscience, but then becomes plagued by a love for Emmaline Iron; and Romeo Puyat, a scrawny, weasely Indian and bottom-feeder, who has a long-standing grievance against Landreaux Iron for which he plots vengeance, even though Landreaux and Emmaline took in and raised his son Hollis, after the mother deserted Romeo.
Along the way, the reader is provided what I assume to be an excellent picture of contemporary (circa 2000) life on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota: A mélange of modern American life and traditional practices. Many adults working odd jobs to make ends meet. Some adults drug- or alcohol-addled. Much abuse of opiates and prescription painkillers. Diabetes. Yet a functioning community.
That community is marvelously brought together and portrayed in the novel's closing chapter. The event is a high-school graduation party for Hollis Landreaux, who is then going into the National Guard. "[T]he yard around the house was crowded with people talking, filling plates with food, laughing, like, well, a bunch of Indians. So many people were eating that all the chairs were taken, then the back steps, the front steps. Towels were laid on top of the cars so girls wouldn't stain their flouncy skirts with car dirt. People stood talking with plates of food in their hands, eating and eating because the food was top-shelf."
The boy LaRose is the fifth LaRose in Emmaline's family, stretching back a century. Interwoven throughout the novel is a thread of the story of those LaRoses. Most of it involves the very first LaRose, an Indian girl so named by the white trader who saved her from a life of sexual degradation and eventually married her. Thus, the novel LaROSE also tells a more historical story of Native Americans, in which tuberculosis and boarding schools are especial scourges.
This is the fourth book that I have read by Louise Erdrich. She is a creative storyteller and a powerful writer, who at times seems to reach the primeval. Over the years she has continuously refined her craft. LaROSE, while very good, is not perfect: although it is not overwhelming, there is too much magical realism, too much of the supernatural for my taste, and the characters of LaRose and his sisters Snow and Josette are too goody-goody. (The girl Maggie, on the other hand, is delightfully complex.) But these are small quibbles. LaROSE is a novel well worth reading, and it should prove memorable in its demonstration that "Sorrow eats time" and "Time eats sorrow."
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This is Erdrich’s 15th novel, so she’s no novice; in fact, she has received many accolades including a National Book Award and is hailed as the writer who has done most to illuminate the lives of Native Americans. Normally, this kind of description of an author would put me off reading their work. I’d expect something heavy and worthy and virtuous and perhaps difficult to read.La Rose is none of these things. It’s just a very good story, very well told and that’s how Erdrich sees herself – primarily as a storyteller. As a novel, this has all the ingredients needed to make for a satisfying read – it is both tragic and comic, well plotted and gripping from start to finish, filled with interesting characters and multi-layered enough to engage the most intellectual of readers. Her prose is beautiful – simple yet strong and at times quite heart wrenching. “Curled underneath the bus seat ….He dozed off …He did not wake when the bus stopped, when all of them got off. He did not wake when they shaved his head for lice and left him in the shower while they found him new clothes without bugs. Not even in bed that night, the next morning either, did he wake. He never woke up. He was still sleeping on that bus.”The novel is set in North Dakota in the late summer of 1999. Landreaux Iron, an Ojibwe man, is out hunting and accidentally shoots and kills the five year old son of his neighbour and friend, Peter Ravich. Landreaux is appalled by what he has done and is tempted to give in to his longstanding weakness for alcohol, but instead buries himself in a sweat lodge and seeks guidance. Following an old Native American custom of atonement, he decides that the best course of action is to offer his own five year old son, La Rose, to the parents of the dead child to help to make their family whole again. Erdrich then goes on to explore the incredibly messy aftermath of this tragic situation and takes the story from the narrow confines of the two families to the wider context of the whole community. There is a pleasing circularity in the structure of this novel, the ending taking the reader back to the first tragic event with surprising results.This is a complex novel, taking the reader back through time to 1839 and the story of the first La Rose, who was sold by her mother to a white man, who abused her. As she traces the story of the succeeding La Rose characters through the generations, Erdrich subtly forces the reader to acknowledge the damage that has been done to the Indian people. And yet, the novel ultimately conveys hope. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain of Chippewa Indians, sees herself as “writing out of the mixture of cultures,” and that is what comes across. She shows us how her Native American characters have taken what they needed from the white man, whilst still being able to hold on the important parts of their heritage.
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