Tales of Burning Love
By Louise Erdrich
HarperCollins, 452 pages, $25
From the locker-room boast to the barroom heart-to-heart, men have long used stories about their relationships with women to bond with other men. In “Tales of Burning Love,” Louise Erdrich turns the tables and makes four women’s stories of their experiences with a man the basis for their knowledge of one another.
The first half of the book introduces those women, in a straightforward narrative of the adult life and marriages of Jack Mauser, a big, weather-beaten building contractor with a failing business in North Dakota. He’s hard-working and capable of affection, a decent guy hogtied by the tangle he has made of his life.
When we first see Jack, he’s drinking to numb a toothache, an activity that rapidly leads to going to a motel with a woman and missing his dental appointment. Still drunk and in pain, he marries his one-night stand. She is a sturdily built Chippewa who, he gradually realizes, is older than he is and, for some crazy reason, serious about him. Their relationship is a blunder with apparently small consequences to Jack, grave ones to the woman who is briefly his wife.
This is a pattern that will be repeated. Twenty years later, he has accumulated four wives–three former and one current, all as unpredictably active in his emotional landscape as volcanoes. Eleanor is thin, neurotic, condescending and self-critical, an analyzer of relationships. Dot, his current wife, is solid and capable, quick-tempered and self-reliant. She works as Jack’s bookkeeper and feels a stingy mistrust of the big, luxurious house he has moved her into. Having built it, he’s unable to sell it. They live in the beautifully paneled rooms of a business error. The other two ex-wives are Candice, a dentist whose professional competence disguises her deep sadness and uncertainty, and Marlis, who grew up unloved, dirt-poor, necessarily crooked as a means to survive. There are times when she has lived in the crawlspace under her sister-in-law’s trailer. Dealing blackjack in a tribal casino is a step up for her.
One way of looking at Jack Mauser’s life is to say that despite his love for these women, and his inconstant urge to protect them, he has offered none of them what she needs. But this does not have the routine, grudging implication that he has failed as a man or that men, in general, are insensitive to women’s needs. Rather, Erdrich suggests that human beings are not so easily satisfied. At their best, her characters provide one another with companionship in the face of disappointment.
Love–the “burning love” of the title–is quick, intense, episodic. It may be part of a defining moment, but as the people live on, the definition blurs. The book offers examples of love that are far more wholehearted. Three of the women are passionately devoted to their children; a fourth to her quest for God. Erdrich makes us aware that in our loves are deeper questions of identity. “All of our love stories begin with our mothers. For although it is our fathers, we are told, whose loves we seek, it is our mother whom we imitate.”
These are the opening sentences of the novel’s second half, which consists of four stories of love, each told by one of Mauser’s wives. One of the book’s governing metaphors–an opposition between fire and ice, the warmth of passion and the chill of circumstance–rules over the conditions of their telling. Leaving Jack’s funeral banquet, the four wives find themselves in a blizzard. Unable to continue, and aware of the danger of freezing to death before morning, they sit in their snowbound car in the dark, telling each other stories to prevent the sleep that could be fatal.
The rules they abide by are as follows: “No shutting up until dawn. Tell a true story. The story has to be about you, something that you’ve never told another soul, a story that would scorch paper, heat up the air.” In a more general sense, Erdrich is telling us, our passions have this lingering afterglow, the power to keep life alive in us, far after the moment of consummation or regret. And in the metaphor of fire for our passions, chill for the world’s indifference, there are elements of danger. There are those who burn and freeze before the tale is done.
If the novel has a weakness, it is that Erdrich pushes the story to the point of improbability. A devout nun who is struck by lightning and disappears we might accept. That she leaves behind a metal walker, “twisted, blackened, and somehow shrunk no larger than a pair of bobby pins,” is too much.
But the compensations for the author’s fanciful excesses are abundant. Erdrich’s strength is that she gives emotional states–as shifting and intangible, as indefinable as wind–a visible form in metaphor. Consider the moment when the women first openly acknowledge their hostility to one another. “The black air in the car seemed to vibrate now, cold and sugary with anger, with delicious feelings they all harbored and savored in private. The initial moment of the argument was to them all like the first cut into the crust of a perfect pie.” This wonderful comparison reminds us of the luxury of indulging in anger long-suppressed, the almost ritual nature of the opening of a quarrel, the sense that argument is a shared thing, a collaboration.
Erdrich adds to this a fine accuracy of observation. A reader can relish the old woman who has “shrunken, hardened, and dried on her tough bones,” who “even smells like clean, sinewy, leathery oak leaves.” It’s easy to visualize the “ruler straight” country roads or snow “running back and forth like threads on a mechanical loom weaving whiteness to a sheer drape.”
Often there is a satisfying exactitude of expression, a poetic neatness to her summing up. Here is Erdrich describing a mortician, made more lonely by his work. “Familiarity with death had connected him to all of life. He was intimate with human brevity, which intensified his lover’s yearning.”
Best of all, despite her ability to attribute meaning, easily and fluently, to events, she knows when to simply present the moment itself, in all the directness and innocence of unmediated experience. This occurs when two of Jack’s wives find they are no longer attracted to him, but to each other. Erdrich captures the newness of it, when one decides to act on her affections. “While making love it did not occur to Marlis, at least, that they were doing anything that fit a category, anything that had a name. . . . It was for both of them as though they were inventing each gesture and act, out of nothing and as they went along.”
The sensation of intimacy this kind of writing creates cannot be overestimated. It feels right, therefore, to describe this novel not in terms of literature but companionship: a comfortable, humorous and generous work.
