The Plague of Doves: A Novel [Hardcover]

Louise Erdrich (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 29, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Erdrich's 13th novel, a multigenerational tour de force of sin, redemption, murder and vengeance, finds its roots in the 1911 slaughter of a farming family near Pluto, N.Dak. The family's infant daughter is spared, and a posse forms, incorrectly blames three Indians and lynches them. One, Mooshum Milk, miraculously survives. Over the next century, descendants of both the hanged men and the lynch mob develop relationships that become deeply entangled, and their disparate stories are held together via principal narrator Evelina, Mooshum Milk's granddaughter, who comes of age on an Indian reservation near Pluto in the 1960s and '70s and forms two fateful adolescent crushes: one on bad-boy schoolmate Corwin Peace and one on a nun. Though Evelina doesn't know it, both are descendants of lynch mob members. The plot splinters as Evelina enrolls in college and finds work at a mental asylum; Corwin spirals into a life of crime; and a long-lost violin (its backstory is another beautiful piece of the mosaic) takes on massive significance. Erdrich plays individual narratives off one another, dropping apparently insignificant clues that build to head-slapping revelations as fates intertwine and the person responsible for the 1911 killing is identified. (May)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* “Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.” Those are the moments Erdrich captures in this mesmerizing novel set in Pluto, North Dakota, a white town on the edge of an Ojibwe reservation. Founded out of white greed, the town is now dying, deserted by both industry and its young people. Evelina, a girl of mixed Indian and white descent, hears many family stories from her irascible grandfather, Mooshum, who has learned to deal with the deep sorrow in his life by practicing the patient art of ridicule (his sly baiting of the local priest is one of many comic highlights). Evelina also learns about the town’s long, bloody history, including the slaughter of a white farm family and the hanging of innocent Native Americans unfairly targeted as the perpetrators of the crime. Over succeeding generations, descendants of both the victims and the lynching party intermarry, creating a tangled history. Throughout Erdrich deploys potent, recurring images—a dance performed to thwart the plague of doves destroying crops, the heartbreaking music of a violin, an athletic nun rounding the bases in her flowing habit—to communicate the complexity and the mystery of human relationships. With both impeccable comic timing and a powerful sense of the tragic, Erdrich continues to illuminate, in highly original style, “the river of our existence.” --Joanne Wilkinson

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper (April 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060515120
• ISBN-13: 978-0060515126
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (124 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #202,708 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Louise Erdrich is the author of twelve novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her debut novel, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent novel, The Plague of Doves, a New York Times bestseller, received the highest praise from Philip Roth, who wrote, "Louise Erdrich's imaginative freedom has reached its zenith--The Plague of Doves is her dazzling masterpiece." Louise Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#25 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#26 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#64 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers

#69 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers

#69 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction

#25 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#26 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#64 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers

#69 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers

#69 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 72 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood." May 5, 2008

By Mary Whipple HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

When Seraph Milk, known as Mooshum to his young granddaughter Evelina, haltingly tells her about a brutal 1911 crime in which he was involved, he reveals the underlying horrors which unite and divide all the families she knows. Mooshum was one of four Ojibwe Indians from Pluto, North Dakota, who were captured and strung up for the gruesome murder of the Lochrens, a white family. Only Mooshum, among the Indians captured in the area immediately after the murders, miraculously survived the vigilante hangings, and while, ironically, only an infant daughter of the Lochrens, overlooked by the murderer or murderers, survived the massacre.

The murder and lynching reverberate through the relationships within both the Indian and white communities over almost one hundred years. Erdrich is at her best here, telling overlapping family stories--horrifying, loving, hilarious, mystical, passionate, lyrical, and thoughtful--as she reveals life in the Native American and white communities from multiple points of view, across time. As the characters evolve, Erdrich reveals her major theme--the diminishing hold the distant past has on successive generations as each generation creates and feeds on its own past. The influx of white residents to Pluto, numerous intermarriages, and the influence of Christian priests, among other effects, all reduce the emphasis on shared Native American values.

Filling her novel with vibrant characters who reveal their lives and stories--and often cast new light on old stories--Erdrich creates a kaleidoscope of swirling images and moods, filled with irony. The drama of the murder and hangings shares time and space with hilarious scenes in which Mooshum and his unregenerate friends taunt the local priest.... Ironically, other members of his family consider becoming priests. Evelina, the third generation, looks for answers, not in religion, but in psychology and love. Another young man Evelina's age becomes an evangelical preacher with a large commune and a snake-handling wife. Though the past and tradition exert their influence, they become less important to subsequent generations, who look toward the future, and by the end of the novel, "the dead of Pluto now outnumber the living."

Though some of Erdrich's character sketches and stories end rather abruptly, perhaps that, too, is part of the thematic structure--in real life such stories also end abruptly, as times and people change. With a far greater emphasis on characters and their stories than we have seen in Erdrich's most recent, more plot-based novels, and with a grand canopy of theme overarching all, this novel is a triumph--big, broad, thoughtful, and ultimately, important. n Mary Whipple

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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Small Town Prairie Life Presented in a Slowly Assembled Puzzle July 7, 2008

By Steve Koss VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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. Read more ›

82 of 99 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Plagued by Short Stories May 8, 2008

By Nina

Format:Hardcover

This is my first novel by this author, and it will probably win a major award this year. That being said, I was glad when, for some unknown reason, I turned to the end of the book halfway through and noticed in the acknowledgements that it had originally appeared as short stories in various periodicals. That explained to me the disjointed nature of the narrative, and I was somewhat relieved at my bewilderment.

"When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape." (p. 268) The story must have a shape, and this one falls short. It reads like the short stories that it was. I would argue that it is individual stories of individual characters - albeit well-written stories - with no real plot.

A family tree on the inside cover would have helped too. Ms. Erdrich may have lived with her characters for years, but I hadn't, and as another reviewer wrote, it was easy to forget who was related to whom.

Nevertheless, I give it 3 stars for the some of the more interesting short stories and characters.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Many Sparks, But Little Flame November 3, 2009

By John VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'll admit that I was disappointed with The Plague of Doves. I've read a little of Erdrich's work in the past, and this novel had certainly drawn some praise. It has its moments. You see many instances in the book of Erdrich's genius, but it doesn't add up, somehow, into a full novel for me. The whole thing just didn't quite live up to expectations.

The novel feels a little more like a collection of stories than like a novel, though the characters are all related to one another in some way. Some of these stories are wonderful. The most living sections of the book are those that possess a folkloric quality and have to do with the older members of the novel's community, Mooshun and Shamengwa. Mooshun, now a grandfather, is sort of a trickster figure at moments (his pranks on the Catholic priest are the funniest and most entertaining parts of the book), and his storytelling is the key thread to tie the novel together. Years ago, he was the only survivor among a party of Obijwe hung for the murder of a white family (they were, of course, innocent). That story, and the mysteries that surround it, is gradually told throughout the novel, with information added by multiple characters, and most of the characters are shaped in some way by the tragedy. Shamengwa, Mooshun's brother, provides a sort of spiritual center to the novel, as he plays music from his violin that gives voice to sorrows that truths that transcend words.

Other stories within the book, however, do not seem to fit with these. Particularly, the middle section tells the story of Billy Peace and his family as he founds a cult and as his family tries to survive his increasing sadism.... That middle section is much more violent and grotesque than the rest of the book and seems, in terms of plot, tone, and theme, to be very disconnected from the other stories. Some stories, such as Evelina's, are fine in and of themselves but seem to stifle the development of the other trains of thought in the book.

I guess that's my main issue with the book, which may not be an issue for others. Once I finished the book, I found myself thinking that it was like a puzzle with many pieces which don't fit together. No thought or impression or image is brought to completion. It was difficult for me not to contrast The Plague of Doves with the last book I read, Jhumpa Lahiri's story collection Unaccustomed Earth, in which many separate stories do seem to work in harmony with one another. The Plague of Doves contains many great moments. It's certainly a readable and often enjoyable book. But its disparate parts fail to work together to create something entirely memorable. Read more ›