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.

War & Peace and Russian Soul

Up to now the book has been, with the exception of recounting scenes of war, somewhat dry: we linger in the salons of Petersburg and Moscow society, where snobbery and currying favor dominate, with jockeying for advantageous marriages and alliances that will lead to better positions. Tolstoy shows us how stultifying it all is - Pierre, now a Mason, walks through this phony maneuvering with the social clumsiness of a man who cannot conceal who he is.

But in Book II Part Four, Russia herself comes to life: Andrei Bolkonsky, whose wife died in childbirth, falls unexpectedly in love with the 16-year-old guileless Natasha Rostov, who in her enthusiasm, spirit and heartfelt honesty represents true Russia. The reader wants to stop the future for these two because their love is so painfully strong and direct - surely tragedy is drawn to such fortunates. Having secured her promise to marry, he goes abroad for a year in deference to his disapproving acerbic father.

Young as she is, she cannot stay gloomy waiting. And so we have the hunt: her brother Nikolai's passion for wolf-hunting galvanizes the household, and though it is not proper, no one can keep Natasha from joining in. She rides well, she doesn't impede the serious hunters, and afterwards they end up at the humble country place of their uncle. She eats the plain peasant fare with gusto, she dances a Russian peasant dance no one has ever taught her, she sings and plays guitar -
"She did [the dance] exactly right, and so precisely, so perfectly precisely, that Anisya Fyodorovna, who at once handed Natasha the kerchief she needed for it, wept through her laughter, looking at this slender graceful countess, brought up in silk and velvet, so foreign to her, who was able to understand everything that was in Anisya and in Anisya's father, and in her aunt, and in her mother, and in every Russian."

As though Tolstoy himself is enchanted by the vibrant young women of the Rostov household, he then gives us Christmas, when the young people join the mummers who come calling. With everyone in disguise, Nikolai Rostov, on leave from his regiment, sees his cousin Sonya distinctly as if for the first time, in her disguise as a Circassian man with a moustache drawn on her face in burnt cork. He is dressed as an old woman, and this pair who have grown up together fall completely in love. Though it is a disaster for his parents, who counted on him to rescue them from penury by marrying a wealthy woman, he must have penniless Sonya.

The joy we see in Natasha's vivacity and Nikolai's unabashed passions are tempered by their sense that never again will life be so wonderful. As readers, we have a similar dread: that not quite halfway through the novel, we have seen its most joyous moments. From here, surely tragedy and grief await us.