http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/
from Gale Literary Sources:
PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Born June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, MN; daughter of Ralph Louis and Rita Joanne Erdrich; married Michael Anthony Dorris (a writer and professor of Native American studies), October 10, 1981 (died, April 11, 1997); children: Reynold Abel (died, 1991), Jeffrey Sava, Madeline Hannah, Persia Andromeda, Pallas Antigone, Aza Marion. Education: Dartmouth College, B.A., 1976; Johns Hopkins University, M.A., 1979. Politics: Democrat. Religion: "Anti-religion." Avocational Interests: Quilting, running, drawing, "playing chess with daughters and losing, playing piano badly, speaking terrible French." Memberships: International Writers, PEN (member of executive board, 1985-88), Authors Guild, Authors League of America. Addresses: Home: Minneapolis, MN. Agent: Andrew Wylie Agency, 250 W. 57th St., Ste. 2114, New York, NY 10107-2199.
CAREER:
Booklist:
/* Starred Review */ Erdrich has perfected the meteor-strike novel—tales that begin with an out-of-the-blue, catastrophic event, and then track the ensuing shock waves. This dramatic structure shapes Erdrich’s National Book Award–winning The Round House (2012) and takes on even more intensity here. Two neighboring families live in a North Dakota community in which many of the Ojibwe are related, memories are long, and the wounds of the war against Native Americans run deep: “Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history.” The women, half-sisters, do not get along; their husbands have become friends. Landreaux and Emmaline Iron are raising five children, including their youngest, LaRose , a preternaturally soulful five-year-old boy. Nola and her white husband, Peter Ravich, have Maggie and Dusty, born at the same time as Dusty’s favorite playmate, LaRose . The summer of 1999 is waning, the Y2K scare growing, and Landreaux, a physical-therapy assistant devoted to his clients and guided by both Ojibwe beliefs and the Catholic Church, is hunting. He’s a crack shot, but when he pulls the trigger, the deer flees, and Dusty falls. Landreaux and Emmaline make a devastating decision: they will give LaRose to Nola and Peter. “Our son will be your son,” Landreaux says. “It’s the old way.” As Erdrich explores the inevitable anguish and complications inherent in this act of sacrifice and attempt at justice, she takes soundings of the wellsprings of trauma and strength shaping these grieving households. The time frame shifts to 1839 when a trading post stood on the land the Irons now occupy. There a desperate Ojibwe woman “from a mysterious and violent family” trades her daughter for rum, igniting a terrifying sequence of passion, murder, and supernatural revenge. Gliding back and forth in time, Erdrich follows the long line of healers named LaRose , and reveals Landreaux’s long-hidden past tied to a boarding school designed to sever Native American children from their roots, as well as his volatile relationship with a fellow student named Romeo, now a brooding, plotting, outlaw loner in the grip of substance abuse, poverty, and rage. Their simmering conflict is a key aspect of Erdrich’s increasingly suspenseful inquiry into the repercussions of vengeance. The radiance of this many-faceted novel is generated by Erdrich’s tenderness for her characters, beginning with the profoundly involving primary figures. But there’s also Father Travis, crucial to The Round House and reappearing here in all his rigor, incisiveness, and unruly desires. A circle of bawdy elder women and the smart and funny sisters Snow and Josette (among the young characters who will fascinate advanced teen readers) provide comic relief and covertly wise counsel, while Peter’s extreme preparedness for the turn-of-the-millennium apocalypse offers a piquant reflection on questions of fear and faith. LaRose is the fifteenth novel in Erdrich’s magnificent North Dakota cycle about the painful and proud legacy and intricately entangled relationships among Native Americans, whites, and people of mixed heritage, a brilliantly imagined and constructed saga of empathy, elegy, spirituality, resilience, wit, wonder, and hope that will stand as a defining master work of American literature for generations to come. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 3/15/2016) (Booklist, vol 112, number 14, p19)
Publishers Weekly:
/* Starred Review */ Erdrich spins a powerful, resonant story with masterly finesse. As in The Round House, she explores the quest for justice and the thirst for retribution. Again, the setting—a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation and a nearby town—adds complexity to the plot. Landreaux Iron, an Ojibwe man, accidentally shoots and kills the five-year-old son of his best friend, farmer Peter Ravich, who is not a member of the tribe. After a wrenching session with his Catholic priest, Father Travis, and a soul-searching prayer in a sweat lodge, Landreaux gives his own five-year-old son, LaRose , to grieving Peter and his wife, Nola, who is half-sister to Landreaux's own wife, Emmaline. In the years that follow, LaRose becomes a bridge between his two families. He also accesses powers that have distinguished his namesakes in previous generations, when LaRose was "a name both innocent and powerful, and had belonged to the family's healers." Erdrich introduces this mystical element seamlessly, in the same way that LaRose and other Ojibwes recognize and communicate with "the active presence of the spirit world." The magical aspects are lightened by scenes of everyday life: old ladies in an assisted-living home squabble about sex; teenage girls create their own homemade beauty spa. Erdrich raises suspense by introducing another, related act of retribution, culminating in a memorable and satisfying ending. (May) --Staff (Reviewed 01/11/2016) (Publishers Weekly, vol 263, issue 02, p)
Kirkus:
/* Starred Review */ After accidentally shooting his friend and neighbor's young son, a man on a Native American reservation subscribes to "an old form of justice" by giving his own son, LaRose , to the parents of his victim. Erdrich, whose last novel, The Round House, won the National Book Award in 2012, sets this meditative, profoundly humane story in the time just before the U.S. invades Iraq but wanders in and out of that moment, even back to origin tales about the beginning of time. On tribal lands in rural North Dakota, the shooter, Landreaux Iron, and his wife, Emmaline, trudge toward their neighbors' house to say, "Our son will be your son now." As both families amble through the emotional thickets produced by this act (the wives are half sisters, to boot), Erdrich depicts a tribal culture that is indelible and vibrant: Romeo, a drug-addled grifter still smarting from a years-ago abandonment by his friend Landreaux (and whose hurt makes this novel a revenge story); war vet Father Travis, holy but in love with Emmaline; and LaRose , his father's "little man, his favorite child," the fifth generation of LaRoses in his family, who confers with his departed ancestors and summons a deep, preternatural courage to right an injustice done to his new sister. Erdrich's style is discursive; a long digression about the first LaRose and her darkness haunts this novel. Just when she needs to, though, Erdrich races toward an ending that reads like a thriller as doubts emerge about Landreaux's intentions the day he went hunting. Electric, nimble, and perceptive, this novel is about "the phosphorous of grief" but also, more essentially, about the emotions men need, but rarely get, from one another. (Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2016) =====
http://therumpus.net/2016/05/the-sunday-rumpus-interview-louise-erdrich/
Interview
Lit Lovers
Writer, educator. North Dakota State Arts Council, visiting poet and teacher, 1977-78; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, writing instructor, 1978-79; Boston Indian Council, Boston, MA, communications director and editor of the Circle, 1979-80; Charles Merrill Co., textbook writer, 1980. Birchbark Books, Minneapolis, MN, owner. Previously employed as a beet weeder in Wahpeton, ND; waitress in Wahpeton, Boston, MA, and Syracuse, NY; psychiatric aide in a Vermont hospital; poetry teacher at prisons; lifeguard; and construction flag signaler. Has judged writing contests.
Sidelights
The daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German American father, Louise Erdrich explores Native American themes in her works, with major characters representing both sides of her heritage. In an award-winning series of related novels and short stories, Erdrich has visited and revisited the North Dakota lands where her ancestors met and mingled, creating "a Chippewa experience in the context of the European American novelistic tradition," to quote P. Jane Hafen in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Many critics claim Erdrich has remained true to her Native ancestors' mythic and artistic visions while writing fiction that candidly explores the cultural issues facing modern-day Native Americans and mixed-heritage Americans. As an essayist for Contemporary Novelists observed: "Erdrich's accomplishment is that she is weaving a body of work that goes beyond portraying contemporary Native American life as descendants of a politically dominated people to explore the great universal questions--questions of identity, pattern versus randomness, and the meaning of life itself." In fact, as Hafen put it, Erdrich's "diverse imageries, subjects, and textual strategies reaffirm imperatives of American Indian survival."
.....
Terry Hong, a reviewer in Library Journal, described LaRose as "another mesmerizing accomplishment from an unparalleled storyteller." A Kirkus Reviews critic called it a "meditative, profoundly humane story" and "electric, nimble, and perceptive." The same critic added: "Erdrich depicts a tribal culture that is indelible and vibrant." "Through complex, dynamic characters and resonant human conflict, Erdrich gives readers the space to ponder atonement [and] the emotional bonds of family," commented Jessica Pearson in BookPage. Christian Science Monitor writer Yvonne Zipp called the novel "simply gorgeous." Ron Charles, a contributor to the Washington Post, suggested: "Erdrich never missteps. The visions that LaRose experiences seem wholly in concert with his adolescent mind, and his efforts to save his adoptive parents from their own despair by hiding all the ropes, pesticides and bullets feel entirely appropriate for a child determined to do what he can." Charles continued: "The recurring miracle of Erdrich's fiction is that nothing feels miraculous in her novels. She gently insists that there are abiding spirits in this land and alternative ways of living and forgiving that have somehow survived the West's best efforts to snuff them out."
From NoveList
http://therumpus.net/2016/05/the-sunday-rumpus-interview-louise-erdrich/
Interview
The Rumpus: It’s maybe strange to begin with a question about a book’s cover, when I loved the story so much and can’t wait to talk to you about it, but I have to ask because the image here is so beautiful and striking and I understand it has a personal connection to you?
Louise Erdrich: Yes, it does. My daughter Aza, who is also a visual artist, did the cover for the book. She digitized my Indian-boarding-school-taught grandfather’s handwriting, and she made the cover.
Rumpus: So this is his actual handwriting.
Erdrich: Yes. And it really was this wonderful… you know, you get these moments sometimes to work with your daughters, and it makes everything so meaningful. Also, my daughter Pallas worked with me on the manuscript. She read different versions of the manuscript, and I would keep showing them to her, and she would give me readings on them—and she really helped me shape the ending.
Rumpus: I love that.
Erdrich: It’s really incredible, that I got to work with them.
Rumpus: And I understand “LaRose” is a name from your ancestors. You have a LaRose in your history.
Erdrich: Yes. We do. We have a LaRose, and I don’t exactly know what great-aunt or great-uncle, but they’re also in the 1897 Turtle Mountain Census. They are Gourneaus—that’s my mother’s maiden name.......
Discussion Questions
1. What are the intended effects of Emmaline and Landreaux’s traditional act of giving LaRose to the Raviches? In what ways does it achieve these or not? What are the costs?
2. What is the nature of the two marriages at the center of the novel, the Irons and the Raviches? How are they similar or different?
3. Consider the first LaRose. What were her particular strengths? What was essential to her ability to survive the neglect and abuse from her mother Mink, Mackinnon, and the mission school?
4. In what ways does Wolfred help and balance LaRose before and throughout their marriage?
5. What common qualities does each LaRose possess?
6. When Nola accepts LaRose from the Irons, she’s not sure if she does so for the profound beauty of the gesture or because it will so deeply punish them. Is she obligated to respond in any particular way to such a gesture?
7. Revenge is sought by various characters throughout the novel: Maggie’s defense of LaRose, LaRose’s fighting the Fearsome Four, Romeo’s longstanding behavior toward Landreaux. What is revenge? What is it intended to accomplish? In what ways does it help or harm? Is it, as Romeo believes, a form of justice?
8. Mrs. Peace, the fourth LaRose and Emmaline’s mother, abstains from any romantic relationships after her “cruel, self-loving, and clever” husband, Billy Peace, dies, saying that, “he had taught her what she needed to know about men.” What does she mean? Where in the novel is a man able to show kindness or selflessness?
9. Consider the girls in both families: The “Iron Maidens,” Snow and Josette, and Maggie Ravich. What is each like? What are their particular strengths? What do they provide for each other?
10. How does each person in the novel respond to such profound grief and loss? Which response seems the healthiest?
11. What’s the relationship between suffering and anger in the novel? What is the value of anger? What’s the healthiest response to it?
12. What does Father Travis provide all involved with the loss of Dusty? What are his own struggles? How do they affect his ability to help his community?
13. What’s the nature of technology as it’s presented in Peter Ravich’s concern about Y2K and Snow and Josette’s obsession with “robot/cyborg” movies?
14. How do the Irons work to balance a connection with their traditional wisdom and rituals with a rapidly changing modern world?
15. At one point Randall explains that the medicine his people did in the past was not magic, but “beyond ordinary understanding now.” What does he mean? Why is it important to not see such healing as magic?
16. Consider the image of cake as it appears throughout the novel. What are its various connotations? How is this complicated by Nola’s obsessive making of cakes or Peter’s concern about the eating of sugar?
17. How does Nola’s deep, suicidal depression affect the members of her family? What aids in her healing?
18. Mrs. Peace, thinking about Frank Baum’s genocidal policy and all the cultural loss and destruction it caused, says the resulting loneliness “sets deep in a person,” and takes four generations to heal. Why might it take this long? What is it about the fourth LaRose that suggests the nature of such healing?
19. To what extent is some kind of disconnection necessary to survive such cultural and personal tragedy? What are the various ways characters disconnect throughout the novel? Where are key moments of reconnection?
20. To what extent is Romeo’s vengeful and self-destructive behavior understandable given his past? In addition to his physical injury, what were important moments of harm or loss? What helps explain his improvement over time?
21. When Landreaux suggests escaping from the boarding school, Romeo sees in his eyes an “opacity of spirit.” What does this mean? Where else do people struggle with such a thing in the novel?
22. Romeo considers the strong painkillers he takes as “the only mercy in this world.” How do other characters use drugs or alcohol? When is it necessary or valuable, when is it unhealthy?
23. Romeo, revealing his often hidden or overlooked intelligence, tries to explain to Hollis about “intergenerational trauma.” What is this? What is necessary for it to be healed?
24. In the kitchen with his mother and sisters, LaRose says “what we used for TV in the olden times was stories.” What is the importance of storytelling in a family or culture? How has modern TV and media changed the nature and content of stories? What are the effects of this?
25. Throwing their dandelion forks into the woods, LaRose says to Maggie, “Let’s stop being grown-ups.” In what ways have the children in each family demonstrated maturity and understanding to compensate for the adults? What might explain such strength and insight in young people?
26. At Hollis’ graduation party, many of the people “spoke in both languages” as they enjoyed cake. In addition to language, what are the best ways to stay connected to valuable traditions?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
1. What are the intended effects of Emmaline and Landreaux’s traditional act of giving LaRose to the Raviches? In what ways does it achieve these or not? What are the costs?
2. What is the nature of the two marriages at the center of the novel, the Irons and the Raviches? How are they similar or different?
3. Consider the first LaRose. What were her particular strengths? What was essential to her ability to survive the neglect and abuse from her mother Mink, Mackinnon, and the mission school?
4. In what ways does Wolfred help and balance LaRose before and throughout their marriage?
5. What common qualities does each LaRose possess?
6. When Nola accepts LaRose from the Irons, she’s not sure if she does so for the profound beauty of the gesture or because it will so deeply punish them. Is she obligated to respond in any particular way to such a gesture?
7. Revenge is sought by various characters throughout the novel: Maggie’s defense of LaRose, LaRose’s fighting the Fearsome Four, Romeo’s longstanding behavior toward Landreaux. What is revenge? What is it intended to accomplish? In what ways does it help or harm? Is it, as Romeo believes, a form of justice?
8. Mrs. Peace, the fourth LaRose and Emmaline’s mother, abstains from any romantic relationships after her “cruel, self-loving, and clever” husband, Billy Peace, dies, saying that, “he had taught her what she needed to know about men.” What does she mean? Where in the novel is a man able to show kindness or selflessness?
9. Consider the girls in both families: The “Iron Maidens,” Snow and Josette, and Maggie Ravich. What is each like? What are their particular strengths? What do they provide for each other?
10. How does each person in the novel respond to such profound grief and loss? Which response seems the healthiest?
11. What’s the relationship between suffering and anger in the novel? What is the value of anger? What’s the healthiest response to it?
12. What does Father Travis provide all involved with the loss of Dusty? What are his own struggles? How do they affect his ability to help his community?
13. What’s the nature of technology as it’s presented in Peter Ravich’s concern about Y2K and Snow and Josette’s obsession with “robot/cyborg” movies?
14. How do the Irons work to balance a connection with their traditional wisdom and rituals with a rapidly changing modern world?
15. At one point Randall explains that the medicine his people did in the past was not magic, but “beyond ordinary understanding now.” What does he mean? Why is it important to not see such healing as magic?
16. Consider the image of cake as it appears throughout the novel. What are its various connotations? How is this complicated by Nola’s obsessive making of cakes or Peter’s concern about the eating of sugar?
17. How does Nola’s deep, suicidal depression affect the members of her family? What aids in her healing?
18. Mrs. Peace, thinking about Frank Baum’s genocidal policy and all the cultural loss and destruction it caused, says the resulting loneliness “sets deep in a person,” and takes four generations to heal. Why might it take this long? What is it about the fourth LaRose that suggests the nature of such healing?
19. To what extent is some kind of disconnection necessary to survive such cultural and personal tragedy? What are the various ways characters disconnect throughout the novel? Where are key moments of reconnection?
20. To what extent is Romeo’s vengeful and self-destructive behavior understandable given his past? In addition to his physical injury, what were important moments of harm or loss? What helps explain his improvement over time?
21. When Landreaux suggests escaping from the boarding school, Romeo sees in his eyes an “opacity of spirit.” What does this mean? Where else do people struggle with such a thing in the novel?
22. Romeo considers the strong painkillers he takes as “the only mercy in this world.” How do other characters use drugs or alcohol? When is it necessary or valuable, when is it unhealthy?
23. Romeo, revealing his often hidden or overlooked intelligence, tries to explain to Hollis about “intergenerational trauma.” What is this? What is necessary for it to be healed?
24. In the kitchen with his mother and sisters, LaRose says “what we used for TV in the olden times was stories.” What is the importance of storytelling in a family or culture? How has modern TV and media changed the nature and content of stories? What are the effects of this?
25. Throwing their dandelion forks into the woods, LaRose says to Maggie, “Let’s stop being grown-ups.” In what ways have the children in each family demonstrated maturity and understanding to compensate for the adults? What might explain such strength and insight in young people?
26. At Hollis’ graduation party, many of the people “spoke in both languages” as they enjoyed cake. In addition to language, what are the best ways to stay connected to valuable traditions?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
========
LaRose is set in the years immediately before and after 9/11 and deals with revenge and healing. The story opens with the tragic death of 5-year-old Dusty Ravich in a hunting accident. Landreaux, the boy’s neighbor and good friend of the family, feels such guilt and remorse over the accident that he decides to resort to a traditional means of reparation — giving the boy’s family his own 5-year-old son LaRose. The Raviches (Peter, Nola and daughter Maggie) have been suffering. Nola is angry and suicidal and is often abusive to Maggie; she also hates Landreaux and his wife Emmaline, who happens to be Nola’s half sister. Maggie is also filled with anger and resentment, against the world in general and Nola in particular, while Peter struggles to hold his family together. The presence of LaRose in their lives does seem to have a healing effect for the Raviches, but it hurts Emmaline and Landreaux, whose marriage suffers, and their four other children. Amazingly, it is the children, particularly LaRose and Maggie, who possess great insight into their current situation and who learn to manage not just themselves but also their parents. They aren’t responsible for their parents’ problems, they didn’t cause them, but they must learn to live with the results and fix what they can. It’s rather like history; maybe “we didn’t start the fire,” but we have to acknowledge what happened and deal with it accordingly so as not to repeat it.
As with her other novels, Erdrich tells her contemporary story against a backdrop of family history which must include the painful history of Native Americans. The name LaRose is significant for Emmaline’s family, the Peaces. All previous LaRoses had been female, but what is significant is that the LaRoses were known for possessing a spirit of healing. The history of these women includes enslavement, rape, illness, forced separation from loved ones and attendance at boarding schools that would take the “Indian” out of them and make them “white,” thus losing their language, traditions, and history. The past of the Peace family informs its present. The wrongs of the past must be addressed — both historical wrongs and personal wrongs. And within this novel, there are many personal wrongs to be addressed, including betrayals, jealousy and infidelity.
The spirituality that pervades Erdrich’s novels never fails to move me. Elders pass stories and knowledge along to the young, spirits leave bodies to travel the world or to communicate with the living. This blurring of the line between living and dead, between “real” world and spirit world is a given for the characters and it is a comfort. Everyone sort of accepts that LaRose is special, that he does have some sort of spiritual gift for healing that is clear even when he is very young. The descriptions of his connection to the spirit world are beautifully written, and his response to them, his sense of what action needs to be taken, is simple, as befits a young boy, but surprisingly effective.
I marvel at Erdrich’s ability to take so many threads, each character’s story rich with detail, filled with colorful imagery and spiritual power, and put them together into one full, coherent story marked by beauty, humor, pathos. As I have remarked in my reviews of her other novels, Erdrich has a masterful ability to create characters who combine some of the best and worst qualities within one person. They are so very human; you can hate some of the things they do but not hate them. LaRose contains a strong message about healing, both personal healing and a more nationwide healing, that is quite apropos in our modern world. Like Landreaux, we have to take the first step and acknowledge the pain we have caused, whether we meant to or not.
