Genealogy Books - The Plague of Doves: A Novel

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Summary: A multi-layered tour-de-force
Comment: Louise Erdrich's latest novel A Plague of Doves might be the best book I've read this year. I kept
turning the pages as the drama that affected an entire town unravels showing the degree to which the
traumatic murder of a family and subsequent lynching of innocent parties binds the townspeople
together in a fascinating web of history.

A Plague of Doves is often compared to
Faulkner. Erdrich's use of multiple narrators as well as the imagery, symbolism, and characters of
her novel certainly evoke Faulkner, but readers daunted by Faulkner's style need not be afraid. A
Plague of Doves contains no page-length sentences or stream-of-consciousness meanderings that make
it difficult to follow. This story is told from the viewpoint of four different narrators who are
all connected to the town's tragic past in various ways. One of the narrators, Evelina Harp,
attempts to parse the connections upon first hearing about the story of the lynching:
/>"The story Mooshum told us had its repercussions -- the first being that I could not look at
anyone in quite the same way anymore. I became obsessed with lineage. As I came to the end of my
small leopard-print diary (its key useless as my brother had broken the clasp), I wrote down as much
of Mooshum's story as I could remember, and then the relatives of everyone I knew -- parents,
grandparents, way on back in time. I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates
and friends until I could draw out elaborate spider webs 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." (86)

I drew my own
family tree chart in the back of my book and added to it as I read and discovered new connections.
After finishing the book, I wish I had thought to make index note cards, as one reviewer did,
because the web of relations is so complicated. For all its complexity the story is that much
richer and more real.

Several sections of Erdrich's novel could stand alone as short
stories, and indeed, parts of it have been published as short fiction, as I learned on reading
Erdrich's acknowledgments at the end of the book. If parts of the novel feel somewhat digressive as
a result, I think Erdrich can be forgiven, for when the reader reaches the last few pages, all the
digressions are shown to be pieces of a complex puzzle -- the reader doesn't know what the picture
is until the last piece is put in place.

In addition to being a fairly good murder
mystery, the novel is rich in imagery, symbolism, and well-drawn characters, and by the end of the
novel, I felt like a resident of Pluto, North Dakota and felt sure that I had truly known all of
these people and uncovered their bloody history myself. And that, after all, is what a good book
should do for us. Go right out and get this book now! It's amazing!

Customer Rating:

Summary: Small Town Prairie Life Presented in a Slowly Assembled Puzzle
Comment: A violin that seemingly causes the inadvertent death of one brother in the Peace family at the hands
of another magically calls out to its next owner, an Ojibwe Indian named Shamengwa, after drifting
about a lake in an empty canoe for twenty years, only to return to the modern-day Peace family via
theft. A man quietly evolves his stamp collecting to include "disaster stamps," that is, stamps on
letters associated with tragedies such as the Titanic. A locust-like invasion of white doves in 1896
accidentally brings together Seraph Milk, known now as Mooshum, with his life's love, Junesse, to
form the family line of the young Evelina Harp, part white and part Ojibwe. A violin recording that
reaches a "strange sweetness" lulls a crying infant to sleep and perhaps saves her life amidst a
horrific family slaughter. Many years later, a violin once again exacts a form of revenge on that
infant's family's murderer.

Louise Erdrich brings together the great silent expanses
of the northern plains, the uneasy truce between White and Native Americans, and a touch of
pantheistic, tribal mysticism to tell the story of three generations' residents in the unlikely town
of Pluto, North Dakota. Ostensibly named before the planet Pluto was discovered, this Pluto
nevertheless contains elements of both the mythological Greek underworld and the end of the solar
system. If the end of the world (North Dakota) can have its own, slowly dying end of the world,
Pluto is it.

The 1911 tragedy that left behind the surviving infant involved a brutal
family slaying of a farm family - parents, a teenage girl, and her two younger brothers. In a
racially-charged act of vigilante justice, three Indian men and a young boy who happened upon the
murder scene several days later are hanged by a gang of white men. Miraculously, the boy survives
the hanging. These twin acts of violence, set against the arbitrariness of Pluto's founding and the
harshness of prairie life at a reservation's edge, create the stage upon which the town's Twentieth
Century lives are played out in a context surpassingly unaffected by the rest of Twentieth Century
history.

The balance of Erdrich's story chronicles the circuitous and complex
interplay of white and Indian lives in the generations since those early days. Even as the vitality
of their town fades away, the residents of Pluto live out their lives beneath the unsettling racist
overhang of those unresolved murders and the subsequent "rough justice" meted out by whites to an
innocent group of Ojibwes. Despite these faint currents of unease, family lines cross, races
intermarry, and the descendants of victims intermingle with the descendants of victimizers. />
Erdrich tells her story through multiple voices, predominantly those of the modern-day
adolescent Evelina Harp and her uncle by marriage, Judge Antone Bazil Coutts. Their stories are
interrupted by that of Marn Wolde, whose bizarre marriage to the cult-like Billy Peace forms one of
the novel's strangest and most disassociated interludes, As each voice is heard and then heard
again, the lives of Pluto's residents, past and present, slowly take form and cohere into
relationships, patterns, and even repetitions. Judge Coutts, for example, reluctantly sells his
house to the developer husband of his long-term paramour only to have the developer experience an
echo of the dove plague when he sets out to demolish the structure. In the book's final pages a new,
fourth voice appears, that of Doctor Cordelia Lochren, and it is through her workmanlike testimonial
that many of Pluto's most enduring mysteries are finally resolved.

THE PLAGUE OF
DOVES is a story of ancestral legacies passed down through and between families and races, tracing
the manner in which those legacies affect the lives of descendants. Some are mystical and some are
explicitly acknowledged, while others are ever present but never mentioned. Through it all, however,
we are in Ms. Erdrich's view products both of our own making as well as all that came before us.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Glad I read it
Comment: I love her stories and will keep on buying them. The pacing of this one was a bit odd, and I think
the explanation is to be found in the notes at the end where you learn that various parts were
published as free standing short stories in various magazines. Oh well. I was glad to have stuck
it out and taken the time. I found it worth reading.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A fantastic read...
Comment: To be sure, this is not "Love Medicine," and the days of Lipsha Morrissey and family seem to be a
dying ember, flickering off in the distant horizon. Nonetheless, Ms. Erdrich is a tremendously
gifted writer, with a talent for weaving together stories that are absolutely mesmerizing. This is
no different.

Customer Rating:

Summary: I Can Understand the Hoopla - to a Point
Comment: There were parts of this three generational book that were absolutely terrific. The members of
oldest generation had spirit, uniqueness and depth. The second generation was a void. The third a
mishmash that never found a voice that resonated. I looked forward to any scene that had the old
men or the retrospective scenes.

The book, chronologically but not as written, starts
with the lynching of Indians falsely accused of a massacreing a family, of which an infant survives.
One of the group of Indians is spared and the yarn commences through him and his future
generations. The telling is extremely disjointed. Only at the end are the relationships of some of
the characters finally connected. This disjointedness really detracted from the book and the lack
of continuity was aided by frequent use of nicknames which made character identification difficult.

The descendants of the lynching mob and victims stay in the area and relationships are
formed. After two generations, I missed the point - do the youth really care? Should the reader?
It seemed the lynching tale was merely a vehicle to bring together disparate character studies. />
The good parts of the book - which were very good - offset the bad to make this a mediocre
novel. It may have done much better as a collection of short stories with no pretense of
connection.

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