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The Plague of Doves: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Louise Erdrich
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 1105
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0060515120
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780060515126
ASIN: 0060515120
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 A multi-layered tour-de-force July 11, 2008
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!
Small Town Prairie Life Presented in a Slowly Assembled Puzzle July 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
 Glad I read it July 4, 2008
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.
A fantastic read... June 30, 2008
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.
I Can Understand the Hoopla - to a Point June 24, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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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