| Louise
Erdrich explores mysteries and miracles on the reservation |
| by
Alden Mudge |
From
|
 When
Louise
Erdrich finished writing The
Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, she went back and read
through the works of William
Faulkner. "I do that every so often," Erdrich says during a call to her
home in Minnesota. "And I always dip into Proust.
And then I dip out of Proust."
 This
makes sense, in a literary sort of way. To immerse oneself in the most luminous
of the novels in Erdrich's Dakota cycle -- Love
Medicine (1984), The
Beet Queen (1986), Tracks
(1988) and, now, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse --
is, in some ways, to plunge into a Proustian stream, where time flows backward
as easily as it flows forward. Even more to the point, over the years, any number
of reviewers have seen parallels between Erdrich's creation in novel after novel
of a mythical Ojibwe Indian reservation and its environs near the Minnesota-North
Dakota border, and Faulkner's creation of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County,
Mississippi.
 "I've
finally figured out that I'm just working on one long novel," Erdrich says in
response to a question about the layers of legend and meaning that accumulate
with each new novel. "I think it is useful to have read the other books. But
I try very hard to make each book its own book. It is its own book. But they
all connect in some way."
 Those
connections are strong in The Last Report. Ostensibly, the action of
the novel revolves around the investigation of the possible sainthood of Sister
Leopolda, who had been a nun at the reservation mission. Leopolda has been credited
with a host of miracles and the Vatican has sent a priest to conduct the inquiry
into these claims. Among the skeptics is ancient Father Damien Modeste, who
has quietly ministered to the spiritual needs of the reservation's inhabitants
for more than 80 years. Through this priest's memories, we see a number of the
familiar events and characters from prior books, but in a new light. More importantly,
we see Father Damien, who has been more or less part of the background in the
previous books. In fact, The Last Report becomes the story of Father
Damien, and Erdrich tells this story with the same immensely satisfying mix
of humor and pathos, legend and dream, wisdom and poetry that typifies the best
of her novels.
According to Erdrich,
The Last Report was one of the hardest novels she has ever written. First,
it presented the usual problem of keeping characters and events consistent with
the earlier novels ("I have a wonderful editor named Trent Duffy. When the manuscript
first goes to him, I've always made some major error, usually having to do with
who was around when and what they were doing. He keeps a file on every character
and he's got a very sharp eye."). Second, her ambitions for the book were large.
"I wanted it to be written at the level of a poem. And yet I wanted it to be
coherent and have the complexity that it needed. It was hard for me to get there.
I threw out huge amounts of paper. I kept the recyclers in business. I think
coming to terms with the subject was difficult. And finding out how to end it
was hard, too."
 Despite
difficulties with the composition of this novel, little seems to keep Erdrich
from tapping into an incredibly rich river of story. After growing up in North
Dakota where her German-American father and Ojibwe mother taught at a Bureau
of Indian Affairs school, Erdrich went east to attend Dartmouth. She was just
28 when Love Medicine was published; the book became a surprise bestseller
and captured the National Book Critics Circle Award as best work of fiction.
Not even the devastating suicide in 1997 of her former husband and long-time
collaborator, Michael Dorris, seems to have dammed her creative flow. Since
then she has published two novels, a children's book, short stories and poems.
She has also rebuilt her life and opened a bookstore with her sister. As we
converse by phone, she coddles the newest addition to her family, a four-month-old
baby.
 But
Erdrich's concern at the moment is how The Last Report is understood.
In the novel's first chapter a young woman named Agnes DeWitt encounters Father
Damien, a Catholic priest en route to an Indian mission. When he drowns in a
flood, Agnes has a direct experience of God and decides to assume the priest's
identity. The fact that Father Damien is actually a woman in disguise will surprise
readers of Erdrich's earlier work.
"I didn't want
[the book] just to be about this revelation that this priest was a woman," Erdrich
says. "That really wasn't the point of it. That's why from the first chapter,
this is not a secret from the reader. I don't want the book to be about gender
politics or even about church politics. That's in there, of course. It's implicit
in choosing what the book would be about. But I most wanted it to be about this
very human choice that she made and how that choice shaped a life. I also wanted
it to be about a priest who is in many ways converted by those who he/she has
come to convert."
The character thinks
and behaves as Father Damien during the day and in public and as Agnes in private
and at night. Erdrich says she developed a set of rules to determine when the
character would react as Agnes and when he would react as Father Damien, not
merely as a mechanical exercise but to further her exploration of the complexity
of human identity. "That is a consistent question for me," she says. "I like
addressing the mystery of identity, probably because I have a variety of identities
of my own."
 Erdrich
says the question of Father Damien's identity evolved as she wrote the book.
"I wrote the first chapter and I really didn't know until writing the very end
of the chapter that this priest was a woman," she says. "It was one of those
situations where a character surprises you. When I went back to look at the
description of Father Damien in Tracks, I realized that I had really
written a rather gender neutral person and that this was somehow there all along.
These books have really always come up with surprises for me, yet when I have
found out something new about a character, it has almost always been consistent
with previous descriptions. So it seems to me there is some unity that underlies
it all that I am capable of somehow tapping into."
 Agnes/Father
Damien eventually abandons rigid church dogma and dispenses love and forgiveness
to all comers. In a mysterious and moving scene near the end of the novel, Agnes/
Father Damien at least temporarily defeats Death, who comes to her in her sleep,
by recalling all the people she/he has been able to forgive since coming to
the reservation.
"Most of my books
are about revenge," Erdrich says. "So it's interesting to write forgiveness
into a book. I think forgiveness is a lot tougher than I've had the grace to
understand."
Alden Mudge writes
from Oakland, California.
Author photo
by Marc Norberg.
The
Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
Search
for Louise
Erdrich's books on BookSense.com
Louise Erdrich
has written novels, nonfiction, poetry, and children's books. She has received
many awards for her writing, including the Academy of American Poets Prize in
1975; the Nelson Algren Fiction Award for "The World's Greatest Fishermen"
and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1982; a Guggenheim fellowship,
the Los Angeles Times Award for fiction, the O. Henry Prize and National Magazine
Award in 1987, the Western Literary Association Award in 1992, and the World
Fantasy Award for The Antelope's Wife in 1999.
Further Reading
Alice
Hoffman
Isabel Allende
Karen Joy Fowler
Gina Nahai
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