“[Erdrich’s] accomplishment in these pages is Tolstoy-like: to render human particularity so meticulously and with such fierce passion as to convey the great, glittering movement of time.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“Wholly felt and exquisitely rendered tales of memory and magic. . . . By novel’s end, and in classic Erdrich fashion, every luminous fragment has been assembled into an intricate tapestry that deeply satisfies the mind, the heart, and the spirit.” — Pam Houston, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Writing in prose that combines the magical sleight of hand of Gabriel García Márquez with the earthy, American rhythms of Faulkner...[Ms. Erdrich] has written what is arguably her most ambitious—and in many ways, her most deeply affecting—work yet.” — New York Times

“An intricate tale of heartbreak and humor . . . [a] wondrous novel. . . . What marks these stories . . . is what has always set Erdrich apart and made her work seem miraculous: the jostling of pathos and comedy. . . .Sit down and listen carefully.” — Washington Post Book World

“The stories told by [Erdrich’s] characters offer pleasures of language, of humor, of sheer narrative momentum, that shine even in the darkest moments of the book.” — Boston Globe

“Erdrich moves seamlessly from grief to sexual ecstasy, from comedy . . . to tragedy, from richly layered observations of nature and human nature to magical realism. She is less storyteller than medium. One has the sense that voices and events pour into her and reemerge with crackling intensity, as keening music trembling between sorrow and joy.” — Los Angeles Times

“Masterfully told . . . one can only marvel, while reading her thirteenth novel, at Erdrich’s amazing ability to do what so few of us can—shape words into phrases and sentences of incomparable beauty that, then, pour forth a mesmerizing story.” — USA Today

“Louise Erdrich’s imaginative freedom has reached its zenith—The Plague of Doves is her dazzling masterpiece.” — Philip Roth

“Mesmerizing. . . Erdrich deploys potent, recurring images. . . 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.’” — Booklist (starred review)

“Fine and engaging. . . . A marvelous novel. . . . There is a symphonic achievement in Erdrich’s capacity to bring so many disparate stories to life, and to have their thematic echoes overlap in such compelling harmony.” — Claire Messud, New York Review of Books

“To read Louise Erdrich’s thunderous new novel is to leap headlong into the fiery imagination of a master storyteller. By turns chilling, funny, astonishing, wild, wrenching and mournful. . . a rich, colorful mosaic of tales that twist and turn for decades.” — Miami Herald

“Erdrich deftly weaves past and present, and her literary territory is as intricate as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.” — MORE Magazine

“The great web that connects Erdrich’s vivid characters is so subtly drawn, and so surprising in its configuration, the novel, like every good story, yields new insights and surprises with each immersion.” — Chicago Tribune

“Erdrich has demonstrated a rare ability to create vibrant, wholly original characters and to describe nature in a prose so lyrical it becomes poetry. ‘The Plague of Doves’ is proof that she has yet to exhaust her powerful magic.” — Hartford Courant

“At once mythic and down-to-earth. . . beautiful, funny, moving, and unexpected.” — Elle

“Instantly gripping.” — Marie Claire

“In scenes of mesmerizing beauty, Erdrich shows how the lives of the victims and the lynch mob entangle decades later. . . . Her powerful conclusion reveals brilliant plotting and makes the effort to get there completely worthwhile.” — People (4 stars)

“A multigenerational tour de force of sin, redemption, murder and vengeance” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A lush, multilayered book. . . . Guilt and redemption pepper these self-sufficient, intertwining stories, and readers who can keep track of the characters will find their efforts rewarded. The magic lies in the details of Erdrich’s ever-replenishing mythology.” — Kirkus Reviews

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.

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the award-winning author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Reviewed by Ron Charles

"History works itself out in the living," says a character in Louise Erdrich’s new novel, and, indeed, the history in The Plague of Doves is something of a workout. She's challenged us before with complex, interconnected stories about the Ojibwe people of North Dakota, but here she goes for broke, whirling out a vast, fractured narrative, teeming with characters — ancestors, cousins, friends and enemies, all separated and rejoined again and again in uncanny ways over the years. Worried about losing track, I started drawing a genealogical chart after a few chapters, but it was futile: a tangle of names and squiggling lines. That bafflement is clearly an intentional effect of this wondrous novel; the sprawling cast whose history Erdrich works through becomes a living demonstration of the unfathomable repercussions of cruelty.

In the creepy, one-paragraph chapter that opens The Plague of Doves, a man murders five members of a white family in Pluto, N.D., near the Ojibwe reservation in 1911. The chronology of the stories that follow is radically jumbled, but the massacre in Pluto precipitates another one: When four hapless Indians come upon the dead family, they discover that a baby has been left alive in the house. Determined to save the child from abandonment but worried they'll be held responsible for the murders, they leave an anonymous note for the sheriff. Their plan backfires, though, and a gang of white men lynches the Indians in a heartbreaking scene that is among the most moving and mysterious in the novel.

These dual crimes hang over the town and the nearby reservation for decades, spreading through the population's DNA as relatives of the victims and the perpetrators work together, intermarry and teach each other's children. "Sorrow was a thing that each of them covered up according to their character," Erdrich writes. "Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood." As the town's economy slowly dies, the whites forget the gruesome incident, or pretend to; the Indians bear it like a festering, private wound; and the area's many biracial members worry over its unanswered questions. "Now that some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim," one of them says, "there is no unraveling the rope."

At the center of all this complication is Evelina Harp, a passionate, endearing young woman, who, like Erdrich, is the daughter of an Indian mother and a white teacher on the reservation. We follow Eve from grade school to college, through crushes on her dangerous cousin, her gargoyle-like sixth-grade teacher and the writings of Anaïs Nin. Eve also has an unquenchable appetite for stories, particularly the captivating tales told by her grandfather, Mooshum. Fans of Erdrich's rich chronicle of the Ojibwe will notice with pleasure his resemblance to the old Indian Nanapush from Tracks (1988) and Four Souls (2004), though Mooshum is, ultimately, a more tragic character.

His intimate rendition of the murders and subsequent lynching permanently jars Eve's sense of her community. "I could not look at anyone in quite the same way anymore. I became obsessed with lineage," she says. "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." But that bewildering thicket of consequence and blame eventually wreaks havoc on Eve's mind, forcing her to reconsider just what kind of woman she is. "When we are young," she observes wisely, "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."

Following the form Erdrich developed in her first novel, Love Medicine (1984), other narrators take over parts of this book, either shading events Eve understands only vaguely or adding whole new branches to the community's history. Some of these discontinuous episodes -- from the arrival of white settlers to the social problems of the 1970s -- relate tangentially to each other, but the connections among many parts of the novel are invisible until much later. We hear the story of 19th-century speculators launching out during winter to lay claim on this land, only to end up eating their shoes one frozen night. The tale of a dove infestation in 1896 -- which gives the novel its title -- reads like a Native American twist on Alfred Hitchcock, the lovely birds accumulating until they become grotesque. And decades later, a bank robbery leads to the bizarre rise of an apocalyptic cult.

What marks these stories -- some of which appeared in the New Yorker and the Atlantic -- is what has always set Erdrich apart and made her work seem miraculous: the jostling of pathos and comedy, tragedy and slapstick in a peculiar dance. As horrific as the crimes at the heart of this novel are, other sections remind us that Erdrich is a great comic writer. When Mooshum isn't leading Eve through the history of her family, he's daring the local Catholic priest to save him or pursuing alcohol and romance with dogged, hilarious determination. Some of the funniest moments take place during a funeral, and even the murders and lynchings that bleed so much heartache are heightened by incongruous notes of humor.

Despite its remoteness, the tiny town of Pluto begins to seem more and more like a microcosm of America and its troubled past. Judge Antone Coutts, a descendant of one of the original white settlers, notes that "the entire reservation is rife with conflicting passions. We can't seem to keep our hands off one another, it is true, and every attempt to foil our lusts through laws and religious dictums seems bound instead to excite transgression." In the end, the hatred and suspicion between Indians and whites are subsumed by their tangled history, the passage of time that bestows its own strange peace. Hovering over the entire novel is the image of those voracious doves, covering the ground, blanketing everything, consuming everything in a fluttering wave of white feathers.

"I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth," says one character, who could just as well be speaking for Erdrich herself, "to judge its miseries and tell its stories. That's who I am."

Sit down and listen carefully.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Plague of Doves

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

The Plague of Doves

In the year 1896, my great-uncle, one of the first Catholic priests of aboriginal blood, put the call out to his parishioners that they should gather at Saint Joseph's wearing scapulars and holding missals. From that place they would proceed to walk the fields in a long, sweeping row, and with each step loudly pray away the doves. His human flock had taken up the plow and farmed among German and Norwegian settlers. Those people, unlike the French who mingled with my ancestors, took little interest in the women native to the land and did not intermarry. In fact, the Norwegians disregarded everybody but themselves and were quite clannish. But the doves ate their crops the same.

When the birds descended, both Indians and whites set up great bonfires and tried driving them into nets. The doves ate the wheat seedlings and the rye and started on the corn. They ate the sprouts of new flowers and the buds of apples and the tough leaves of oak trees and even last year's chaff. The doves were plump, and delicious smoked, but one could wring the necks of hundreds or thousands and effect no visible diminishment of their number. The pole-and-mud houses of the mixed-bloods and the bark huts of the blanket Indians were crushed by the weight of the birds. They were roasted, burnt, baked up in pies, stewed, salted down in barrels, or clubbed dead with sticks and left to rot. But the dead only fed the living and each morning when the people woke it was to the scraping and beating of wings, the murmurous susurration, the awful cooing babble, and the sight, to those who still possessed intact windows, of the curious and gentle faces of those creatures.

My great-uncle had hastily constructed crisscrossed racks of sticks to protect the glass in what, with grand intent, was called the rectory. In a corner of that one-room cabin, his younger brother, whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom, slept on a pallet of fir boughs and a mattress stuffed with grass. This was the softest bed he'd ever lain in and the boy did not want to leave it, but my great-uncle thrust choirboy vestments at him and told him to polish up the candelabra that he would bear in the procession.

This boy was to become my mother's father, my Mooshum. Seraph Milk was his given name, and since he lived to be over one hundred, I was present and about eleven years old during the time he told and retold the story of the most momentous day of his life, which began with this attempt to vanquish the plague of doves. He sat on a hard chair, between our first television and the small alcove of bookshelves set into the wall of our government-owned house on the Bureau of Indian Affairs reservation tract. Mooshum would tell us he could hear the scratching of the doves' feet as they climbed all over the screens of sticks that his brother had made. He dreaded the trip to the out-house, where many of the birds had gotten mired in the filth beneath the hole and set up a screeching clamor of despair that drew their kind to throw themselves against the hut in rescue attempts. Yet he did not dare relieve himself anywhere else. So through flurries of wings, shuffling so as not to step on their feet or backs, he made his way to the out-house and completed his necessary actions with his eyes shut. Leaving, he tied the door closed so that no other doves would be trapped.

The out-house drama, always the first in the momentous day, was filled with the sort of detail that my brother and I found interesting. The out-house, well-known to us although we now had plumbing, and the horror of the birds' death by excrement, as well as other features of the story's beginning, gripped our attention. Mooshum was our favorite indoor entertainment, next to the television. But our father had removed the television's knobs and hidden them. Although we made constant efforts, we never found the knobs and came to believe that he carried them upon his person at all times. So we listened to our Mooshum instead. While he talked, we sat on kitchen chairs and twisted our hair. Our mother had given him a red coffee can for spitting snoose. He wore soft, worn, green Sears work clothes, a pair of battered brown lace-up boots, and a twill cap, even in the house. His eyes shone from slits cut deep into his face. The upper half of his left ear was missing, giving him a lopsided look. He was hunched and dried out, with random wisps of white hair down his ears and neck. From time to time, as he spoke, we glimpsed the murky scraggle of his teeth. Still, such was his conviction in the telling of this story that it wasn't hard at all to imagine him at twelve.

His big brother put on his vestments, the best he had, hand-me-downs from a Minneapolis parish. As real incense was impossible to obtain, he prepared the censer by stuffing it with dry sage rolled up in balls. There was an iron hand pump and a sink in the cabin, and Mooshum's brother, or half brother, Father Severine Milk, wet a comb and slicked back his hair and then his little brother's hair. The church was a large cabin just across the yard, and wagons had been pulling up for the last hour or so. Now the people were in the church and the yard was full of the parked wagons, each with a dog or two tied in the box to keep the birds and their droppings off the piled hay where people would sit. The constant movement of the birds made some of the horses skittish. Many wore blinders and were further . . .