I know just how she felt. Birchbark is one of two handmade places my imagination turns to in conjuring pure happiness (the other is Upaya Zen Center). If family weren't waiting for me to move on, I'd stay all day, grinning at the ceiling or reading everything within reach.

This is a lovely site. Thank you for creating it.

My family and I live in Texas, and have only been to Birchbark Bookstore once, so it is especially touching to see these tender drawings and notes on good books. They capture some of the charming warmth of where you are.

At the moment I am deep into writing about FOUR SOULS, and am struck by what a finely crafted and deeply felt book it is. For Scarecrow Press, I am compiling a reference guide called 21ST CENTURY GOTHIC: GREAT GOTHIC NOVELS SINCE 2000, and FOUR SOULS more than earned its place as one of the fifty-five most intriguing neo-Gothic works from around the world. It has both terror and a wintry humor, a woman who has been hurt and intends to hurt, and I simply haven't read anything as involving for a long time. If any haven't had a chance to read it, I'd reach for it next.

Cheers from Texas,
danel.olson@lonestar.edu

i LOVE your new website. especially the Dogs section (even though I am a cat person myself). What a fun read!!! i'll be back for more dog blogs and other book recommendations.

Native music. Birchbark Books creates comfort.

I would like to share some thoughts about the new Louise Erdrich novel, The Plague of Doves. I do this with great caution, aware that with publication coming in May, most will not have seen it and it would not be fair to reveal the outcome of the various story lines in the book. I have a copy now only because until very recently my wife was a bookstore owner and as such we received an advanced reader’s copy.

As with Erdrich’s other recent novels, as I went through the book I kept a crazy quilt chart of the relationships of the key characters, always a process that engages me. (Historical reference at the library or on the internet is also a frequent itch for me; who was this Mustache Maude anyway?) These relationships unfold through a succession of stories featuring the same characters in different situations at different times. Erdrich has honed this structure, taking it, I believe, to a new level of sophistication and engagement for the reader.

The ability to create a novel that holds together as a whole out of these multiple stories is quite a creative achievement. The gifted and accomplished E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes is structured as a succession of the stories of people who successively come to posess a particular accordion, but the people are not particularly related. There the narrative thrust that is so critical seemed attenuated; the multiple stories did not seem to add up to a satisfying overall story.

When we experience a singular story, even one with flashbacks, this narrative thrust and unity is less an issue for me. I think of Hemingway’s Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In Wendell Barry’s quietly intense novel, Jaber Crow, we find the multiple stories over a long period – but here one character holds center stage. Marilynne Robinson’s heralded Gilead has a somewhat similar structure, the life and soul of Reverend John Ames unfolding page after beautiful page.

But with Plague of Doves the genius is to take a structure of multiple stories and multiple key characters and through their vividness and the power of their stories and connections create a strong overall narrative thrust. And we are engaged, satisfied, richer for it.


At times these individual stories (several of which I realized I had previously read in The New Yorker) made me question their possibility – could they really have happened? Could the banker John Wildstrand really have conspired with teenager Billy Peace to kidnap his own wife as part of a fake ransom plot? Could there really be this many complex interrelationships among this many characters over this many generations? This would not pose a question if the overall novel was written at some other level of realism (fantasy,magical realism,whatever), but at what I perceive as the somewhat grounded realism in Plague of Doves it did occur as a question for me.

As I reflected on this, I concluded that it really isn’t an issue. Think of Eliot Spitzer. Also, I’ve never lived in the Plague of Doves setting- Pluto, North Dakota, with a stable, smaller circle of people in a relatively more isolated community. I also think of some of the improbable synchronicity in the closing of our own bookstore early this year; the very last book in the store (the others had already left with astonishing speed), a book about Down Syndrome children, was bought by a special needs teacher who was familiar with it and had been wanting it.

When we think of these things, what is possible or probable to us changes. Life is full of improbable stories.

Two flat-out probables for me are that The Plague of Doves will be more then well received by readers and critics and that Louise Erdrich will continue to provide us with mind-, heart- and soul-nourishing characters and stories.

Is there any reliable online list of Louise Erdrich readings/appearances as she promotes her new novel? She's not listed as touring on the HarperCollins website (and they have failed me before with misprinted dates!).

Isn't it sort of a big jump from DeSoto, Cortes, Custer, Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt to Ma from Little House on the Prairie?

Thank you for this particular blog especially the reference to Susan Power's words. I am of Cherokee descent on the maternal side(cannot tell you how many times people have told me "you don't look it"...)and the knowledge and the words burn inside of me. I wonder if Ms. Erdrich has experienced this--"we are here" but the more "native looking" Peoples just don't buy it.

I didn't think it was much of a jump re: Ma from Little House on the Prairie. The point was the lack of dimensionality of the native person in such books--that the land needed to be cleared and the natives with it in order to pursue the "good life" promised by Manifest Destiny.