Four Souls: A Novel (Erdrich, Louise) (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "FLEUR TOOK the small roads, the rutted paths through the woods traversing slough edge and heavy underbrush, trackless, unmapped, unknown and always bearing east..." (more)
Key Phrases: medicine dress, four souls, Under the Ground, John James Mauser, Fleur Pillager (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fleur Pillager, one of Erdrich's most intriguing characters, embarks on a path of revenge in this continuation of the Ojibwe saga that began with Tracks. As a young woman, Fleur journeys from her native North Dakota to avenge the theft of her land. In Minneapolis, she locates the grand house of the thief: one John James Mauser, whom she plans to kill. But Fleur is patient and stealthy; she gets herself hired by Mauser's sister-in-law, Polly Elizabeth, as a laundress. Polly acts as the household manager, tending to the invalid Mauser as well as her sister, the flaky and frigid Placide. Fleur upends this domestic arrangement by ensnaring Mauser, who marries her in a desperate act of atonement. Revenge becomes complicated as Fleur herself suffers under its weight: she descends into alcoholism and gives birth to an autistic boy. In Erdrich's trademark style, chapters are narrated by alternating characters—in this case Polly Elizabeth, as well as Nanapush, the elderly man from Tracks, and his wife, Margaret. (Nanapush and Margaret's relationship, and the jealousies and revenge that ensue, play out as a parallel narrative.) More so than in other of Erdrich's books, this tale feels like an insider's experience: without the aid of jacket copy, new readers will have trouble feeling a sure sense of place and time. And Fleur herself—though fascinating—remains elusive. Nevertheless, the rich detail of Indian culture and community is engrossing, and Erdrich is deft (though never heavy-handed) in depicting the struggle to keep this culture alive in the face of North American "progress." The themes of fruitless revenge and redemption are strong here, especially when combined with the pull of her lyrical prose; Erdrich may not ensnare many new readers, but she will certainly satisfy her already significant audience.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

For many readers -- as well as writers -- the end of a well-made novel can be a bittersweet moment. The pleasure of the book's conclusive, final chords is always weighed against the inevitable farewell one must say to the book's imaginary world and its inhabitants.

Louise Erdrich's 1988 novel Tracks was just such a book, a rich fictional tapestry of Native American life at the turn of the century. Based on characters who first appeared in her National Book Critics Circle award-winning Love Medicine, it told the story of Fleur Pillager, a North Dakota Ojibwe woman who stands against the economic and cultural genocide of her people.

It's easy to see why Erdrich would want to return to Fleur Pillager, and her new novel, Four Souls, picks up more or less where Tracks left off. The novel begins as Fleur is embarking on a mission of revenge, hunting down the man responsible for the theft and destruction of much of her tribal lands. She finds him in a grand house in Minneapolis, into which she quickly and expertly insinuates herself, taking a job as a laundress.

But the owner, John Mauser, is no typecast villain; married to the imperiously frigid Placide, and bossed about by his spinster sister-in-law, Polly Elizabeth, who presides over the household, he cuts a pathetic figure. He also suffers from seizures, brought on, according to his doctor, by a lack of sexual congress with his wife. Disappointed that she can't "destroy him fresh," Fleur abandons her murderous designs and seduces him instead. Before long the marriage is over, Fleur assumes her station as head of the household, and she bears Mauser a son, an autistic savant.

Like Tracks, Four Souls is told in part by Fleur's grandfather, Nanapush, who is speaking to the grown daughter Fleur abandoned in that novel. Though newcomers to Fleur's story may find the manner of Nanapush's narration confusing in spots, his voice is pleasingly authoritative and economical. He relates Fleur's journey of revenge with the compactness of a parable and balances moments of watery mysticism with a good streak of bawdy humor. Equally engaging is the voice of the novel's second major narrator, Polly Elizabeth, an avowed anti-Indian racist who is so child-hungry that Fleur's pregnancy arouses an instantaneous conversion to her cause: "[I] realize[d] that if I could lay aside my small contempt, I might cherish her," she says. "I might be able to help her grow the child, the babe whom I wanted to live with a longing quite beyond my own selfish habits." Erdrich's theme is less revenge than the unpredictable ways old wounds can heal. This affords the book a summing-up quality that may leave some readers feeling left out. Without the full weight of Tracks to push against, and the tragic history it relates, much of what transpires in Four Souls has the airiness of an extended epilogue. Who, for instance, is this daughter Fleur left behind? And what bearing does this have on her decision to have a child with Mauser?

Erdrich straddles the fence a bit, providing readers who might not know Tracks with just enough backstory to wish they did. But the better solution she employs is a resonating amplification of her theme via an adjacent subplot. For all Fleur's magnetism as a character, her story is upstaged in the book's second half by Nanapush himself and his own tale of vengeance gone comically wrong.

The object of his murderous rage is his "life's enemy," an Indian named Shesheeb who married and subsequently cannibalized Nanapush's sister during the "winter of our last starvation." Returned to the reservation after a lengthy absence, Shesheeb has settled down the road from Nanapush and his wife, Margaret -- "a splinter in my foot," says Nanapush, "that pierced me when I stepped down hard." The stage is set for confrontation when Margaret impulsively sells a portion of their land to predatory white developers in order to buy a linoleum floor for their cabin. This transaction is vintage Erdrich: It manages to be both a comically awful marital spat, something purely personal, and a crucible containing all the elements of the venality and recklessness of the Indian cultural genocide. When Margaret adds sexual jealousy to the mix, claiming a flirtation with Shesheeb, Nanapush embarks on a murderous mission that, despite its seriousness, possesses all the exuberant lapses of logic and risqué set pieces of Shakespearean comedy, including everything from cross dressing and heroic drunkenness to an amorous dog.

The novel could run the risk at this point of being simply overwhelmed by its subplots, but Erdrich elegantly weaves her threads together in the book's last movement, when Fleur, her husband's fortune in ruins, returns with her son to the reservation and undertakes the final reclamation of her ancestral lands. How she accomplishes this is a secret no reviewer should reveal, and I won't. Suffice to say it adds a lovely coda to a book that, sequel or not, possesses many of the signature charms of its author's most accomplished work.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins (June 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066209757
• ISBN-13: 978-0066209753
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #158,578 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Four Souls adds to the richness of Erdrich's world, June 22, 2004

By	Joe Sherry (Minnesota) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Fleur Pillager is one of Louise Erdrich's legendary characters. Fleur is legendary within the world Erdrich has created as well as being an iconic character of Erdrich's work as a whole. "Four Souls" continues the story of Fleur that was begun in Erdrich's second novel "Tracks". Having lost her land to the white developers when Margaret Rushes Bear chose to use the money to save her own son Nector's piece of the land rather than Fleur's, Fleur Pillager walked away from the reservation. She walked until she was exhausted, and then she kept walking until she reached the Cities. She stopped, as if she was drawn, in front of a house that was hiring a cleaning woman. The house belonged to John James Mauser (a family name you should recognize from "Tales of Burning Love"). Mauser is the developer who purchased Fleur's land and she seeks to exact revenge on Mauser. Fleur's revenge is not the typical revenge where the person is quickly killed. No. Fleur's revenge has Fleur become part of the household so that she can build up Mauser enough that he can sufficiently know what he is going to lose when Fleur decides it is time to take her revenge.

The novel is narrated by two characters. The first is the trickster, Nanapush. Nanapush tells the story of Fleur as he knows it (at no time is Fleur the narrator the story), so as he tells Fleur's story, he also tells his own. The other narrator is Polly Elizabeth Gheen. Polly Elizabeth is the sister of Mauser's wife. She is able to tell more of the story of Fleur's arrival to the household and what the impact there was. She also reveals a bit more of her family's history and that of Mauser's history. In Erdrich's world, everything is interconnected.

I have to be upfront in saying that Louise Erdrich has long been my favorite author, and it is with great anticipation that I look forward to the publication of a new novel. "Four Souls" did not disappoint me. Rather than having a simple plot, Louise Erdrich and "Four Souls" tells a story of Fleur Pillager, of revenge (in many forms), of love, and Erdrich continues to craft out a world that feels very real. Each volume only serves to add to the richness and the color of The Little No Horse Reservation and the characters which inhabit and intersect with it. This is a very lyrical (and perhaps spiritual) story and while it may not be the type of story that every reader is looking for, it is one that I love.

-Joe Sherry

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yet another stellar novel from Louise Erdrich, August 30, 2004

By	Anonymous (Illinois USA) - See all my reviews

I've read most of the author's works and while I would not say this is my favorite, I have to say that she has matured so much as an author over the years that this is a must read book. I particularly like how she shares imagery and concepts in this book without feeling the need to explain them to the non-Anishinaabe audience, and potentially interrupting the poetry of the work itself. - It was amazing how she brought back to mind things I knew and had forgotten, simply through the force of her writing. The greatest impact for me was the effect the book had even 4 days later - the themes of this book are both universal and incredible. Thank you for such an outstanding book!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Fascinating and Enigmatic Tale , July 24, 2004

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

There is no revenge like success, as the saying goes, and Fleur Pillager is out for both. She adopts her mother's name, Four Souls, and sets foot on a mission to seek restitution from the robber baron who has stripped bare the Minnesota forests her Ojibwe ancestors called home.

As the scheme to avenge her family unfolds, Fleur proves to be no ordinary woman. She is so complex, in fact, that it takes several narrators to tell her story, a device that makes FOUR SOULS a fascinating and enigmatic tale of the myths, sorrows and passions of a vanishing civilization.

There is old Nanapush, tribal elder, who observes as Fleur launches her private incursion against the ailing World War I veteran, John James Mauser, lumber baron and social scion of Minneapolis society. Polly Elizabeth, Mr. Mauser's sister-in-law, who runs the household, hires Fleur as a housemaid and laundress. She seems efficient and is seemingly everywhere and nowhere, all at once. Little does Polly Elizabeth know how Fleur will change the lives of all within the walls of the Mauser mansion.

Fleur discovers that her nemesis is far too ill to thoroughly appreciate his demise at her hand, so she sets out to cure him of odd maladies from World War I wounds. Her tender mercies lead instead to marriage to Mauser, and as Polly Elizabeth says, "Nothing in the look of her and the ignorant silence told me she could possibly end up connected to me." Nor could Polly Elizabeth or John James Mauser ever imagine where that connection would lead.

FOUR SOULS evolves slowly and as magically as the mists on a summer morning pond. Louise Erdrich, who wrote the bestseller TRACKS, which is a precursor to FOUR SOULS, seems to know the minds, voices and ways of the Ojibwe Indians. The shift in narrative voice is sometimes confusing as the transitions are not always obvious, but clarity is restored as you fall into the cadence of the various characters. All are well defined and drawn, and FOUR SOULS haunts you with its aura of irony and fulfillment --- fulfillment that doesn't always come in the manner in which it is sought.

--- Reviewed by Roz Shea