Louise Erdrich's mesmerizing new novel, her first in almost three years, centers on a compelling mystery. The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine; only the youngest generation, of mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives.

Evelina Harp is a witty, ambitious young girl, part Ojibwe, part white, who is prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina's grandfather, is a seductive storyteller, a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. Nobody understands the weight of historical injustice better than Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, a thoughtful mixed blood who witnesses the lives of those who appear before him, and whose own love life reflects the entire history of the territory. In distinct and winning voices, Erdrich's narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities' collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel's final pages.

"The Plague of Doves" is one of the major achievements of Louise Erdrich's considerable oeuvre, a quintessentially American story and the most complex and original of her books.

Related Categories:
Books > Fiction > Literary

A town connected by a painful past

Louise Erdrich's 13th mesmerizing and generations-spanning tale, A Plague of Doves, takes place in the small, now-dying town of Pluto, North Dakota—a town founded by whites in the late 1800s on the very edge of an Ojibwe Indian reservation, in the hope of profiting from the soon-to-be-built railroad line. There Evelina Harp, a young woman of mixed heritage, hears from her grandfather Mooshum a haunting story—a story kept from her for more than 50 years.

That story is Mooshum's recollection of the gruesome murder, in 1911, of one of Pluto's white families, and the hanging shortly thereafter of three innocent Indians cast as the perpetrators, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Evelina subsequently becomes obsessed with lineage, gradually tracing the blood history of all the participants—those murdered, the Native American scapegoats and the lynching party—through their remaining relatives in "elaborate spider webs of lines and intersecting circles."

Erdrich reveals these webs of relationships gradually, by means of chapters moving back and forth in time, each devoted to one of the descendants. These include Evelina herself, whose grandfather escaped the lynching but still feels guilt for the role he played that day; the judge who marries Evelina's aunt; Pluto's female doctor who, as an infant, was the only one in her family to survive that long-ago massacre; the teaching nun descended from brothers in the lynching mob—each is irrevocably tied to the others in never-ending threads of history.

Enriching this character-driven plot are exquisitely drawn scenes, like the mass of late-19th-century parishioners wildly dancing through the cornfields, hoping to scare away the ravenous plague of doves destroying their crop; a young nun's swirling habit as she rounds the bases at recess; and two of Pluto's oldest survivors taking their daily walk around the town perimeter, until their footsteps "wear [our] orbit into the earth." As Erdrich traces the rippling repercussions of that fateful day, her characters' lives leave an indelible trace on her readers.

Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.