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.

The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss

In 2005, Nicole Krauss’s layered work The History of Love was published. As in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s novel The Shadow of the Wind, we have an intergenerational mystery of lives in danger, at its heart a love story. 

In The History of Love, the mystery is about a book of that title being translated by a girl’s mother. Who actually wrote it, why is our young heroine, Alma, named after the girl in the book, what happened to the girl in the book? 

Krauss fully captures the voices of her three narrators: 

Leo Gursky (an old Jewish man, WWII refugee living in New York. We see a boy from a village in Poland, in love with a girl whom, in the chaos of the buildup to war, he lost track of): “Then one day I was looking out the window. Maybe I was contemplating the sky. Put even a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza. The afternoon passed, darkness sifted down. I reached for the chain on the bulb and suddenly it was as if an elephant had stepped on my heart. I fell to my knees. I thought: I didn’t live forever. A minute passed. Another minute. Another. I clawed at the floor, pulling myself along toward the phone.” 

Alma Singer: “I WAS SIX WHEN MY FATHER WAS DIAGNOSED WITH PANCREATIC CANCER. That year my mother and I were driving together in the car. She asked me to pass her bag. ‘I don’t have it,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s in the back,’ she said. But it wasn’t in the back. She pulled over and searched the car, but the bag was nowhere to be found. She put her head in her hands and tried to remember where she’d left the bag. She was always losing things. ‘One of these days,’ she said, ‘I’m going to lose my head.’ I tried to picture what would happen if she lost her head. In the end, though, it was my father who lost everything: weight, his hair, various internal organs.” 

Bird Singer (Alma’s younger brother, who believes he is one of the 36 lamed vovniks, holy people on whom the existence of the world depends): “I have been a normal person for three days in a row. What this means is that I have not climbed on top of any buildings or written G-d’s name on anything that doesn’t belong to me or answered a perfectly normal question with a saying from the Torah. It also means I have not done anything where the answer would be NO to the question: WOULD A NORMAL PERSON DO THIS? So far it hasn’t been that hard.” 

Their stories are braided with misunderstandings and grief, resolving at last after many blind crossings. This novel is beautifully written, leavened with both humor and pathos as readers stumble alongside characters learning, being wrong, learning more, still wrong…

The Perfect Stranger, by Gregory SETH Harris

This satiric novel by Denver author and poet Gregory SETH Harris, set in a world similar to ours yet degraded in ways the story plays with throughout, offers the observations of a visitor, that Perfect Stranger of the title, “S,” who stumbles upon the micropolis. This place seldom has visitors, and residents’ instinct is to regard any with suspicion. And yet, he is offered a garret room in the mansion of one of the town’s important people, banker Charles Dinero (“CD”) Smolet. Living in that household, S gets to know CD’s wife, Eleanore (“Mrs. Sticky Buns”); daughter Penny, about to turn 17 and thus be eligible for auction for marriage; son William (“Buck”), a high school student at Gladiator U; and spirited child Pearl, whose shadow plays games with S’s. Though S is the primary character, Pearl is the beating heart of the book, intuitive and mischievous. 

The micropolis is divided along class lines according to wealth, corpulence, and race, with ever-new books of codified rules designed to keep it that way. It is the season of the S-election, in which candidates for the ruling council are campaigning. And so we have intrigue: a group of young anarchists planning to disrupt the process; the populist candidate whose chameleonlike appearance and speeches change to fit his audience; and the sudden ambiguity of Buck, who seems set to win the top position by reason of his wealth and his primacy at the Turkey Shoot – of which I’ll say no more here. 

The town Libarian, Neimann Gorge, an erudite misfit who lives with his Auntie McAsser and her nasty little dog, teaches history to the group of anarchists, meanwhile hoping to woo the dazzlingly beautiful Assistant Libarian, Mz Pritt. Here’s a sample of the prose: 

“Saska Swamin,” Neimann began. “Slender as she is, is a tasty morsel.” He pressed her slim spine [an anorexic volume of natural lambskin] to his thin lips, looking inward a moment before proceeding. … “Hombres d’ Garbiage reinforce our mistaken assumption that we are less than we truly are. Some even exalt in their baser nature, convincing others to do the same. Thus we hire ourselves out to stress factories, servants to their (& ultimately our own), less-than-perfect nature. In the evening, we return home to lead lives of quiet defecation. Only the enlightened, the occasional brave, the uncommonly foolish – or the lucky – break thru the chains of the status woe to move ever closer to that wisdom etched in every atom of our beings.” 

Harris holds up a distorted mirror to our times and society, and the warped version of our world we see there should give us pause: that micropolis and its residents are more like us than we might like to admit. And yet, he does it with abundant wit and humor. These strange times call for a reckoning, indeed a reconnoitering, and The Perfect Stranger is a great place to start.