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Summary
Summary
The Plague of Doves
Author Notes
Karen Louise Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where both of her parents were employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Erdrich graduated from Dartmouth College in 1976 with an AB degree, and she received a Master of Arts in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1979.
Erdrich published a number of poems and short stories from 1978 to 1982. In 1981 she married author and anthropologist Michael Dorris, and together they published The World's Greatest Fisherman, which won the Nelson Algren Award in 1982. In 1984 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Love Medicine, which is an expansion of a story that she had co-written with Dorris. Love Medicine was also awarded the Virginia McCormick Scully Prize (1984), the Sue Kaufman Prize (1985) and the Los Angeles Times Award for best novel (1985).
In addition to her prose, Erdrich has written several volumes of poetry, a textbook, children's books, and short stories and essays for popular magazines. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for professional excellence, including the National Magazine Fiction Award in 1983 and a first-prize O. Henry Award in 1987. Erdrich has also received the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, the Western Literacy Association Award, the 1999 World Fantasy Award, and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction in 2006. In 2007 she refused to accept an honorary doctorate from the University of North Dakota in protest of its use of the "Fighting Sioux" name and logo.
Erdrich's novel The Round House made the New York Times bestseller list in 2013. Her other New York Times bestsellers include Future Home of the Living God (2017).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. The dazzling performance of Kathleen McInerney and Peter Francis James creates the sense of a full-cast audio with voices ranging from childhood to the aged with everything in between. With the rhythms of a charming entertainer, Mooshum, a family patriarch, spins tall tales from the days of magical happenings and sad realities. Billy, half-visionary and half-lunatic, is performed as both spellbinding and dangerous. As Antoine Brazil Coutts, James sounds judicious, fair and hesitant at revealing too much. McInerney covers a range of women: Marm, Billy's wife, has an emotionless voice, like one who has to preserve every drop of energy for pending disasters; and Evalina's light lilt with a faint Native American intonation is perfect. Despite the epic cast, the narrators never leave the listener confused. Passages of fiddle music are a lovely addition. This audio is a model recording of one of America's best novelists. A Harper hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 14). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
YOU can usually count on three things in a Louise Erdrich novel. One: the tale will be told by many characters, each with his or her own chapter or three. Erdrich established this pass-the-talking-stick style in early novels like "Love Medicine" and "The Beet Queen." It's served her well, and she's staying with it Two: although these narrators differ in age, perspective, gender and disposition, they will share an uncannily similar voice, hushed and deeply observant. Erdrich's characters have rich inner lives, expressed in language that's often achingly poetic but can sometimes resemble a John Mayer lyric. ("I was everything the mountain knew") This is Erdrich, take her or leave her. Third: there will be Indians, there will be white folks, and there will be tension between the two. In "The Plague of Doves," Erdrich returns to familiar territory, the stark plains of North Dakota, where the little town of Pluto sits beside rusting railroad tracks, slowly dying. What's killing it? Old grudges, lack of opportunity, long-haul trucking, modernity itself. A civic-wide aversion to ambition doesn't help. "We are a tribe of office workers, bank tellers, book readers and bureaucrats," says Evelina, the quiet part-Ojibwa girl who anchors the novel. Don't let Evelina fool you. Pluto's modest citizens live lives of quiet rectitude punctuated by outbursts of lust and crime, the one often precipitating the other. These folks don't need closets to hold their skeletons, they need storage units. Not that carnal desire and embezzlement - and kidnapping and vigilante murder and sweet-justice murder and death by bee sting - are such bad things, but the people of Pluto wear the history of these acts like heavy overcoats. They can't escape their own past, or their grandfathers' past. No wonder the kids are high-tailing it for the bright lights of Fargo. The tension between Indians and whites in "The Plague of Doves" is both historical and geographical. Pluto is next to the reservation, and some say the town fathers stole tribal land. That's minor, though, compared with the real stain on Pluto's reputation: "In 1911, five members of a family - parents, a teenage girl, and an 8- and a 4-year-old boy - were murdered," one of the narrators recalls. "In the heat of things, a group of men ran down a party of Indians and what occurred was a shameful piece of what was called at the time 'rough justice.'" The lynched Indians' only crime was having the misfortune to discover the murder victims. Since then, the vigilantes and their descendants have done their best to forget the incident. "The town," we are told, "avoids all mention." That's not to say the past is past. The novel opens with Evelina, a sixth grader, managing successive crushes on Corwin Peace, a classmate, and Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, a teacher. Mention of the Buckendorf name sends Evelina's grandfather, a rascally character named Mooshum, into a soliloquy about a certain historical incident. Mooshum, it turns out, was the only Indian caught but not murdered during the "rough justice" that followed the massacre. And Sister Mary Anita's great-grandfather was a member of the lynching party. Evelina, trying to make sense of it all, draws up a chart: "I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw out elaborate spiderwebs of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper." "The Plague of Doves" unfolds like a novelistic version of Evelina's chart. The action bounces between Evelina; Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who sees the reservation's dramas march through his courtroom; Marn Wolde, a tough local farm girl; and a final narrator whose name is too much of a plot spoiler to reveal. The question of who really murdered that farm family adds suspense to the plot, but deeper, more satisfying discoveries arrive with the slow unspooling of the community's bloodlines, with their rich and complex romantic entanglements. "The entire reservation is rife with conflicting passions," Judge Coutts observes. "We can't seem to keep our hands off one another, it is true, and every attempt to foil our lusts through laws and religious dictums seems bound instead to excite transgression." Coutts, a rational man carrying on an irrational affair with a married woman, looks to philosophers like Marcus Aurelius for answers. "The only problem with those old philosophers," he finds, "was that they didn't give enough due to the unbearable weight of human sexual love." One of the risks of Erdrich's multiple-narrator structure is that sometimes a narrator comes along who blows the rest of them off the page - and makes a reader wonder why on earth we'd ever return to those bores. Marn Wolde's story, which chronicles the rise and fall of Billy Peace (young Corwin's uncle), a charismatic cult leader, is a tour de force of sly comedy. As Billy's wife, Marn finds herself trapped on his Branch Davidian-style compound with hilariously commonplace concerns about her bright young daughter, Lilith. "I thought she was terribly intelligent," Marn says, "but there was no outside testing." When Marn exited the novel, I felt like calling after her, "For the love of God, don't leave now!" In "A Plague of Doves," Erdrich has created an often gorgeous, sometimes maddeningly opaque portrait of a community strangled by its own history. Pluto is one of those places we read about now and then when big-city papers run features about the death of small-town America. When you grow up in such a place, people know that your mother was a wild child back in high school. They know why your uncle talks to himself in the grocery store. What Erdrich knows is that this history, built up over generations, yields a kind of claustrophobia that has only one cure: Leave. Bruce Barcott's most recent book is "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird." What's killing this North Dakota town? Old grudges, lack of opportunity, long-haul trucking, modernity itself.
Library Journal Review
This 13th novel by National Book Critics Circle Award winner Erdrich is set in the fictional town of Pluto, ND, and takes place following the 1911 massacre of five members of a white family. The reading is exceptional: actress Kathleen McInerney gives each of the female characters a distinctive, identifiable voice, while actor Peter Francis James takes the character of Judge Coutts from boyhood through old age with an amazing change in tone and richness. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. [With tracks every three minutes for bookmarking; the Harper hc, released in May, received a starred review, LJ 2/15/08.--Ed.]--Deb West, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Plague of Doves Chapter One The Plague of Doves In the year 1896, my great-uncle, one of the first Catholic priests of aboriginal blood, put the call out to his parishioners that they should gather at Saint Joseph's wearing scapulars and holding missals. From that place they would proceed to walk the fields in a long, sweeping row, and with each step loudly pray away the doves. His human flock had taken up the plow and farmed among German and Norwegian settlers. Those people, unlike the French who mingled with my ancestors, took little interest in the women native to the land and did not intermarry. In fact, the Norwegians disregarded everybody but themselves and were quite clannish. But the doves ate their crops the same. When the birds descended, both Indians and whites set up great bonfires and tried driving them into nets. The doves ate the wheat seedlings and the rye and started on the corn. They ate the sprouts of new flowers and the buds of apples and the tough leaves of oak trees and even last year's chaff. The doves were plump, and delicious smoked, but one could wring the necks of hundreds or thousands and effect no visible diminishment of their number. The pole-and-mud houses of the mixed-bloods and the bark huts of the blanket Indians were crushed by the weight of the birds. They were roasted, burnt, baked up in pies, stewed, salted down in barrels, or clubbed dead with sticks and left to rot. But the dead only fed the living and each morning when the people woke it was to the scraping and beating of wings, the murmurous susurration, the awful cooing babble, and the sight, to those who still possessed intact windows, of the curious and gentle faces of those creatures. My great-uncle had hastily constructed crisscrossed racks of sticks to protect the glass in what, with grand intent, was called the rectory. In a corner of that one-room cabin, his younger brother, whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom, slept on a pallet of fir boughs and a mattress stuffed with grass. This was the softest bed he'd ever lain in and the boy did not want to leave it, but my great-uncle thrust choirboy vestments at him and told him to polish up the candelabra that he would bear in the procession. This boy was to become my mother's father, my Mooshum. Seraph Milk was his given name, and since he lived to be over one hundred, I was present and about eleven years old during the time he told and retold the story of the most momentous day of his life, which began with this attempt to vanquish the plague of doves. He sat on a hard chair, between our first television and the small alcove of bookshelves set into the wall of our government-owned house on the Bureau of Indian Affairs reservation tract. Mooshum would tell us he could hear the scratching of the doves' feet as they climbed all over the screens of sticks that his brother had made. He dreaded the trip to the out-house, where many of the birds had gotten mired in the filth beneath the hole and set up a screeching clamor of despair that drew their kind to throw themselves against the hut in rescue attempts. Yet he did not dare relieve himself anywhere else. So through flurries of wings, shuffling so as not to step on their feet or backs, he made his way to the out-house and completed his necessary actions with his eyes shut. Leaving, he tied the door closed so that no other doves would be trapped. The out-house drama, always the first in the momentous day, was filled with the sort of detail that my brother and I found interesting. The out-house, well-known to us although we now had plumbing, and the horror of the birds' death by excrement, as well as other features of the story's beginning, gripped our attention. Mooshum was our favorite indoor entertainment, next to the television. But our father had removed the television's knobs and hidden them. Although we made constant efforts, we never found the knobs and came to believe that he carried them upon his person at all times. So we listened to our Mooshum instead. While he talked, we sat on kitchen chairs and twisted our hair. Our mother had given him a red coffee can for spitting snoose. He wore soft, worn, green Sears work clothes, a pair of battered brown lace-up boots, and a twill cap, even in the house. His eyes shone from slits cut deep into his face. The upper half of his left ear was missing, giving him a lopsided look. He was hunched and dried out, with random wisps of white hair down his ears and neck. From time to time, as he spoke, we glimpsed the murky scraggle of his teeth. Still, such was his conviction in the telling of this story that it wasn't hard at all to imagine him at twelve. His big brother put on his vestments, the best he had, hand-me-downs from a Minneapolis parish. As real incense was impossible to obtain, he prepared the censer by stuffing it with dry sage rolled up in balls. There was an iron hand pump and a sink in the cabin, and Mooshum's brother, or half brother, Father Severine Milk, wet a comb and slicked back his hair and then his little brother's hair. The church was a large cabin just across the yard, and wagons had been pulling up for the last hour or so. Now the people were in the church and the yard was full of the parked wagons, each with a dog or two tied in the box to keep the birds and their droppings off the piled hay where people would sit. The constant movement of the birds made some of the horses skittish. Many wore blinders and were further . . . The Plague of Doves . Copyright © by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
