Larose by Louise Erdrich
Erdrich won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel ‘The Night Watchman’ in 2021. She is a well-established and critically acclaimed American writer about native American communities; her mother is a member of the Ojibwe tribe who are the subject of this 2016 novel.
The story is set in North Dakota as the new millennium approaches. Landreaux is hunting a buck when he accidentally shoots dead the young son, Dusty, of his family’s close friends and neighbours, Peter and Nola Raviche. This tragic act not only tears apart the two families but reverberates through the tightknit Ojibwe community. Struggling with his guilt, Landreaux draws on the ancient lore of his tribe and persuades his wife to give Larose, his young son and a close friend of Dusty, to the dead boys’ parents. The act seems strangely anachronistic and quickly begins to spread unease in both families. His wife, Emmaline cannot forgive Landreaux’s clumsy attempt to heal his friends’ loss and Peter and Nola are left unsettled because they fear that Larose could be torn away from them at any time – a second loss.
The least troubled by the arrangement is Larose himself. He is an extraordinary young boy, whose gentle but steadfast nature inspires love. He has a precocious understanding of his role in the families’ drama as a healing presence and begins to form a loving relationship with his new family whilst never forgetting his birth parents. There is a shaman-like quality that Erdrich explores by recounting throughout the book the story of the boys’ ancestors who also bore the name Larose and were exceptional people who in different ways had acted as healers. Now if this sounds dangerously like magic realism, a pet hate of mine, the reason it did not bother me was because the presence of the dead is part of the tribe’s beliefs and philosophy. This is powerfully underlined by Erdrich when Larose takes himself to the isolated woodland where Dusty was shot and begins to communicate not only with his friend but a shifting group of voices and presences of Ojibwe ancestors. Larose wants to be assured that his friend is at peace and assure Dusty that he will try his best to comfort his bereaved family. Throughout the novel this idea that the dead surround us and break through the filter between the living and their world is simply an accepted feature of the Ojibwe’s everyday experience.
The book is not, however, a straightforward unfolding of the way Larose helps the Raviches and his own parents come to terms with the death. Far from it, because this book moves with confidence amongst the generations within the native American community to show that the imperial American mission of the 19th century still reverberates in their current struggles. The well-publicised high addiction rates amongst native Americans seems a natural reaction to their sense of dislocation from the traditions and practices central to their identity. Even without the tragic shooting, the community is struggling having been side-lined to reservation areas in areas of relative social deprivation. There is, however, hope in the way that Emmaline and Landreaux work in caring professions and their children embrace a sense of aspiration and community by evolving hybrid identities comprising tradition and the future.
The novel does not, exclusively, focus on the tense family drama of tragedy and redemption - there are almost too many different plot strands that Erdrich develops. For example, there’s Romeo, a sharp but bitter drifter and chancer, who collects information and secrets because he is always looking for a chance to strike at Landreaux, whom he blames for everything that has gone wrong with his life. Erdrich spends time on Romeo’s back story and, therefore, we get to know him not just as an adjunct to Landreaux’s story. Another strong character is Pete and Nola’s spiky teenage daughter, Maggie. She is already at odds with Nola, both of them strong but complex women, even before the shooting. Her initial antagonism towards her mother begins to change as she spends more time with Larose and his two sisters. A mixture of care and volleyball help her to become her mother’s protector, along with Larose, in some of the most powerful scenes in the book.
I could go on, as there is an array of characters, including a mixed-up priest, Father Travis, bringing a sturdy sense of calm whilst dealing with his own demons from the Afghanistan conflict and his attraction to Emmaline. Somehow, though, Erdrich weaves these characters towards some sort of resolution, sometimes not perfect and certainly hard attained but with a sense of hope that loss and destructive addiction are not the final things to say about this community. I thought this was a terrific book and I am keen to read something else from this talented writer.