Last week I finished Louise Erdrich's The Master Butchers Singing Club, which I've owned for a while but, surprisingly, simply hadn't gotten around to reading.
You see, I adore Louise Erdrich. I'm absolutely infatuated. I was first introduced to Louise (that's right, I like to pretend we're on a first name basis) when I read Love Medicine in my Native American Literature course at IC, which, generally speaking, left little impact on me. I took it during my craziest semester, read less of the material than I'd care to admit and enjoyed even less, and only picked up The Beet Queen in Portland, OR, a year later because I recognized Louise's name and got excited. That book then sat on my shelf until I started teaching two years later, and I started reading it during my study hall duty time (back before I had past students to find me during my down time). I will never forget the moment I realized The Beet Queen was linked to Love Medicine -- I was downright giddy. The subtle link prompted me to reread Love Medicine, and my literary crush on Louise blazed into full-fledged, I-have-to-read-everything-this-woman-writes kind of love.
Generally, when I tell people why I love Erdrich's writing, I explain how I love hearing the same story from multiple perspectives. Love Medicine and some of the other books in that series do that -- each chapter tells us someone else's view of the same story, all moving the story along for us through their eyes and in their voice. (Faulkner also uses this trick, and I love his works as well.) Other novels in that series show us the story from the beginning of the series through the end from an unexpected perspective; either way, we get details we never would've gotten otherwise. I also like that Erdrich didn't write the series in chronological order, and many of the books don't move in a linear fashion, either. My Native American Lit professor explained years ago that this is a characteristic of many Native stories; I like seeing connections in the plot in a new way. All in all, Erdrich created an entire community for me to fall into and fall in love with, and I haven't been able to put her or her characters down since.
Enter The Master Butchers Singing Club. As I said, I was so drawn into Erdrich's world in North Dakota, I simply started buying all of her books, especially those set in or near the fictional Argus like Love Medicine and Singing Club. That's really where the similarities to Erdrich's other novels end, though. Many of the characters in Erdrich's other novels are Native American and show her heritage and culture through their experiences; nearly all of the characters in this novel are European American, some even right off the boat from Germany after WWI. (One character, though, does carry the infamous Lazarre last name found in many other Erdrich books. I love connections like that!) This book moves linearly, told always from a third-person narrator who shifts its omniscient powers from one character to another. This gives a great illusion of various perspectives, but it's not the same as the blatant change in voice that occurs when other Erdrich characters take turns in first-person. It was different -- it was almost traditional; it was more like many, many other books out there than it was like the intertwined Love Medicine series.
And yet, I loved this book, despite the fact that it wasn't like all the Erdrich books I've gotten lost in over the past four years. Erdrich's writing style still felt familiar and fostered that "getting lost" feeling. This book tells of her German American heritage, gives unique insight to German Americans during WWII, shows love and loss from new perspectives, introduces us to another strong, independent woman character, shines a floodlight on the complexities of and connections among sexuality, love, and family. This book is a love story on top of a love story intermingled with a love story -- some romantic, some parental, some seemingly unexplainable -- whose backdrop is a country struggling first with economic depression and then with war. This book is a double murder mystery. This book is a coming of age story. This book has a surprise ending, which makes me hope against all hope that Erdrich will write another novel on this section of the Argus community.
And through it all, it was like hearing an old friend tell me another story. Erdrich might give her characters clear voices, but her own voice and style shine through regardless of her chosen literary techniques. I'd missed Louise, and I hadn't even realized it. I was glad we got to catch up a little.
When I finish Louise's books, I feel much the way Delphine, one of the main characters, did when she finished books:
"When she came to the end of a novel, and put it down and with reluctance left its world, sometimes she thought of herself as a character in the book of her own life. She regarded the ins and outs, the possibilities and strangeness of her narrative. What would she do next?" (p. 301)
