Antelope Wife
- Book Review,
by Louise Erdrich
Amazon.com
As Louise Erdrich's magical novel The Antelope Wife opens, a cavalry soldier pursues a dog with an Ojibwa baby strapped to its back. For days he follows them through "the vast carcass of the world west of the Otter Tail River" until finally the dog allows him to approach and handle the child--a girl, not yet weaned, who latches onto his nipples until, miraculously, they begin to give milk. In another kind of novel, this might be a metaphor. But this is the fictional world of Louise Erdrich, where myth is woven deeply into the fabric of everyday life. A famous cake tastes of grief, joy, and the secret ingredient: fear. The tie that binds the antelope wife to her husband is, literally, the strip of sweetheart calico he used to yoke her hand to his. Legendary characters sew beads into colorful patterns, and these patterns become the design of the novel itself. The Antelope Wife centers on the Roys and the Shawanos, two closely related Ojibwa families living in modern-day Gakahbekong, or Minneapolis. Urban Indians of mixed blood, they are "scattered like beads off a necklace and put back together in new patterns, new strings," and Erdrich follows them through two failed marriages, a "kamikaze" wedding, and several tragic deaths. But the plot also loops and circles back, drawing in a 100-year-old murder, a burned Ojibwa village, a lost baby, several dead twins, and another baby nursed on father's milk. The familiar Erdrich themes are all here--love, family, history, and the complex ways these forces both bind and separate the generations, stitching them into patterns as complex as beadwork. At least initially, this swirl of characters, narratives, time lines, and connections can take a little getting used to; several of the story lines do not match up until the book's conclusion. But in the end, Erdrich's lovely, lyrical language prevails, and the reader succumbs to the book's own dreamlike logic. As The Antelope Wife closes, Erdrich steps back to address readers directly for the first time, and the moment expands the book's elaborate patterns well beyond the confines of its pages. "Who is beading us?" she asks. "Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bit of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of the earth?... We stand on tiptoe, trying to see over the edge, and only catch a glimpse of the next bead on the string, and the woman's hand moving, one day, the next, and the needle flashing over the horizon." -- Mary Park, editor
From Publishers Weekly
"Family stories repeat themselves in patterns and waves, generation to generation, across blood and time." Erdrich (Love Medicine, etc.) embroiders this theme in a sensuous novel that brings her back to the material she knows best, the emotionally dislocated lives of Native Americans who try to adhere to the tribal ways while yielding to the lure of the general culture. In a beautifully articulated tale of intertwined relationships among succeeding generations, she tells the story of the Roy and the Shawano families and their "colliding histories and destinies." The narrative begins like a fever dream with a U.S. cavalry attack on an Ojibwa village, the death of an old woman who utters a fateful word, the inadvertent kidnapping of a baby and a mother's heartbreaking quest. The descendants of the white soldier who takes the baby and of the bereaved Ojibwa mother are connected by a potent mix of tragedy, farce and mystical revelation. As time passes, there is another kidnapping, the death of a child and a suicide. Fates are determined by a necklace of blue beads, a length of sweetheart calico and a recipe for blitzkuchen. Though the saga is animated by obsessional love, mysterious disappearances, mythic legends and personal frailties, Erdrich also works in a comic vein. There's a dog who tells dirty jokes and a naked wife whose anniversary surprise has an audience. Throughout, Erdrich emphasizes the paradoxes of everyday life: braided grandmas who follow traditional ways and speak the old language also wear eyeliner and sneakers. In each generation, men and women are bewitched by love, lust and longing; they are slaves to drink, to carefully guarded secrets or to the mesmerizing power of hope. Though the plot sometimes bogs down from an overload of emotional complications, the novel ultimately celebrates the courage of following one's ordained path in the universe and meeting the challenges of fate. It is an assured example of Erdrich's storytelling skills. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Erdrich suffuses Minneapolis with Native American spirit.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Diana Postlethwaite
...there is light as well as darkness in this fictional universe, and encountering it offers pain and exhilaration in equal measure.
The New Yorker
[A]lthough she occasionally trips on the line between tragedy and farce, her smoky, resonant voice never falters.
"Reading The Antelope Wife offers a rich taste of the bitter and the sweet. Louise Erdrich looks unflinchingly at the secrets of the human heart."
The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Thomas Curwen
Richly cadenced, deeply textured, Erdrich's writing has the luster and sheen of poetry, each sentence circling deeper into emotion, motivation and rationale, until love touches not eternity but death, transforming The Antelope Wife into a story of longing and of longing assuaged, as sustaining as Love Medicine, serious, sometimes flawed but altogether passionate.
"Spiritual yet pragmatic, Erdrich's deft lyricism affirms while it defies the usual lines separating the mythical from the daily. Erdrich leads every event in her book to its outer limits, so no detail is mundane. And each scene contains bits of hilarity, extravagance, of horror. Throughout, the author's ample afection for human nature finds expression in playful inventiveness. Erdrich's many readers will bend their ears to it, and like any worthy recipients of prayer will be moved as they are bewildered."
From Booklist
In reviewing Tales of Burning Love (1996), we observed that "the power of narrative and the salvation of love have always been Erdrich's quintessential themes." Those themes remain crucial to her latest novel, but here they only sporadically shine through a cloudy sky: "History is grief and no passion is complete without its jealous backdrop." In her characteristically swirling narrative style, Erdrich tells the story of two intertwined Ojibwa families, the Roys and the Shawanos, and the fiery love that scars their souls and inhibits their freedom. We hear many voices in these overlapping and interconnected stories, jumping in time and place from a cavalryman who bayonets an Indian woman and then saves an infant girl to a reservation dog who avoids the soup pot and becomes a canine Greek chorus, but the axis around which the entire cast rotates is an event, not a person: when a smooth-talking trader abducts (or maybe just entices) a beguilingly beautiful woman from a powwow and takes her with him to Minneapolis, a tremor is felt on the mythic seismograph, echoing the past and foreshadowing the future. Some readers may have difficulty with the narrative jumps and the rich overlay of magic realism, but for those willing to slowly immerse themselves in this nonlinear world as one soaks in a hot bath, the rewards are many. Erdrich's image-rich prose seduces the reader just as her trader lures his Antelope Wife and as the other lovers across generations forge their connections ("His low, vibrant voice sank down the front of Mary's dress"). And while it is those passionate connections that again provide salvation for Erdrich's storm-tossed characters, we feel equally the power of connections to constrain, to keep Antelope Wife from stretching the horizon. Bill Ott
From Kirkus Reviews
Erdrich's stunningly imagined sixth novel follows the trail blazed by such well-received predecessors as The Bingo Palace (1994). Over several generations, a strange symbiosis binds, as it divides, two families, the Roys and the Shawanos. Erdrich begins with a cryptic imageof women sewing beads into an indiscernible patternthen briefly tells the story of Scranton Roy, who is drawn westward by the vision of a mysteriously beckoning woman, but who, having failed to find her, goes into service with the US Cavalry. During a raid, Roy kills an old Indian woman and then rescues an infant girl whose cradle is strapped to the dog that carries her. He raises the girl as his own, until her mother, Blue Prairie Woman, comes for her. Shortly after, the newly motherless girl is sheltered by a herd of antelope, who somehow sense she's one of them. She'll return again to ``civilization,'' to begin a cycle of restlessness and unbelonging that afflicts her descendants and the men who love them. From this haunting beginning, Erdrich fashions a powerful and dauntingly elliptical tale of obsession and separation that moves backward and forward through time from Northern Plains Indian settlements to present-day Minneapolis. Its preternaturally striking characters (whose tangled relationships will be understood best by those who know Erdrich's earlier fiction) include: Klaus Shawano, who acquires ``the antelope woman,'' but cant keep her; several sets of twin daughters, all frustratingly distant from the men who claim them; Richard Whiteheart Beads, who causes the deaths of those he loves and attempts to take his own life when his beleaguered ex-wife remarries; andErdrich's most brilliant inventionthe ghostly ``windigo dog,'' a creature magically akin to the humans it patiently serves and protests. Too many explanations are hastily knotted together at the end, and a genealogy would have helped, but few readers will complain. This is realism at its most magical, in a novel as satisfying as any Erdrich has written. ($125,000 ad/promo) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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