LaRose, a novel by Louise Erdrich

This 2016 novel is a masterful landscape of the human heart, shattered by grief, rage, and jealousy, healed by generations of LaRoses. In brief, it’s the story of a tragedy – a man sees a big buck on his land and shoots it – except what he kills is his neighbor’s young son. Landreaux Iron is Ojibwe, his neighbor Peter Ravich is white. In this rural area they live closest. Their wives are half-sisters who are wickedly hateful to each other. 

Landreaux decides that the traditional way of repairing such damage is to give his youngest son, LaRose, to the Raviches. The repercussions of this decision are deep and wide. LaRose, however, handed over at the age of six, talks to the ancestors, and finds ways to move both families toward healing. In his lineage he is the fifth LaRose (so far), the first being a girl sold by her drunken mother to a trapper/ trader in exchange for booze, in the 1870s. 

Going up against demons was Randall’s work. Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now?... “You did right,” [Randall told Landreaux] at last, “the elders… knew the history. Who killed the mother of the first [LaRose], Mink, and what she could do. Then her daughter, her granddaughter, the next one, and Emmaline’s mom. Evil tried to catch them all. They fought demons, outwitted them, flew… People think that what medicine people did in the past is magic. But it was not magic. Beyond ordinary understanding now. But not magic.” 

Erdrich has a genius for letting a sly adjective say everything: “Also in Landreaux’s past there were the buzzers, bed checks, whistles, bells, divided trays, measured days of boarding school. There was an unspeakable neatness of military preparation for violence.” 

and 

“Landreaux should not have imagined it was over… A man’s heart, shriveled raisin, prune of loneliness, burnt clam, understood what it was to lose out on love. And lose to a lying liar. Romeo bet his livid black heart could burst Landreaux’s baggy heart sack.” 

and 

“Peter felt the heavy sadiron of his heart lurch. He waited but it was stuck on the wrong side of his chest.” "Ah, god, please, Emmaline." 

"I can’t stand it anymore," she said. “It was never supposed to go on forever, was it?” 

Her characters, assaulted by a system that wants them all dead, persist. But amid the misery she gives us moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity, as when the nurse’s aide/ addict who steals pills from the senior home, mixes them for an evening’s high and spends several days incapacitated with raging intestinal misery, complaining to his bathroom walls that those old ladies poisoned him.