LISTENING TO LOUISE ERDRICH talk about the Midwest is like hearing someone rhapsodize about a long-lost and recently rediscovered lover. (underscore) When the novelist spoke to the Tribune on the publication of her most recent novel, “The Painted Drum,” she described the yearning that pulled her away from New England, where she’d ostensibly settled,
and back to her native Minnesota. “I was in a state of homesickness all the time when I was away from the Midwest,” Erdrich says. “And that homesickness played itself out and made it a great strain to construct characters. I was always feeling out of place, and there was a kind of desperation.” She pauses, as if remembering the sense of longing. “I was recreating a familiar place for myself.”
Tired of fighting an emotional battle against her surroundings, Erdrich moved to Minnesota in the mid-’90s. Once back in that “familiar place,” she continued her writing career and expanded her role in the community by opening BirchBark Books and Native Arts in 2000, and later establishing BirchBark Books Press. She laughingly informed a reporter from Publishers Weekly that her 800-square-foot Minneapolis store boasts “the highest percentage of dream catchers per square foot of any bookstore in the country.”
And then there are the store’s bookshelves, to which Erdrich has contributed impressively. “I love to write,” Erdrich says, surprising no one. “I always have. I love to tell stories. I’m probably addicted to it.” It shows: “The Painted Drum” is Erdrich’s 12th novel, following close on the heels of 2004’s “Four Souls.”
After winning the 1983 Nelson Algren Short Fiction contest, she expanded her first-place story into the novel “Love Medicine,” which won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle award for fiction (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). A later novel, “The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse,” was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. This year Erdrich is the recipient of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Award for fiction.
None of her many public accolades seems to have affected Erdrich’s intensely private persona. Defying scores of interviewers, she prefers to talk about geographical landscapes rather than her emotional topography, which has been bulldozed and rebuilt in the last dozen years–her adopted son was killed in a car crash in 1991, and her ex-husband committed suicide in 1997 amid allegations of child molestation.
Fittingly, then, our conversation veered away from the boundaries of her personal life, lingering instead on her lifelong connection to the Midwest and the themes that define her writing, particularly her Native-American heritage. Throughout her career, Erdrich has eschewed traditional narratives, weaving her stories around the fundamental ties that bind us all to family and our shared history.
Erdrich’s mother is French-Indian, her father German-American, and Erdrich seems utterly unconflicted about where her genealogical loyalty lies. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, and takes great care to present an unflinchingly honest portrayal of a life and world that are slowly disappearing.
When she sits down to write a story that portrays Native-American culture, she says: “I make a commitment to try and get the stories right. I want to stay as close to the truth as I can; that’s very important to me.”
Truth–historical, geographical and spiritual–is central to “The Painted Drum,” which traces the journeys of Faye Travers, an appraiser of Native-American antiquities. Erdrich considers this a departure from her previous novels. “Working on this book was very different,” she says. “For the first time I was writing a contemporary character who’s roughly my age, living in the here and now.”
And while she admits a “fictive bond” between herself and her central character, Erdrich rejects the suggestion that this is an autobiographical work.
“I think there’s always a bond between writer and protagonist, even if one is writing a character who’s very unlike oneself,” she says. “Faye’s not me, and this is not an autobiographical book, but at the same time, every character reveals some facet or potential of my personality.”
One side effect of critical acclaim, and the attendant fame, is compulsory travel: to the book signings, readings and, inevitably, the awards ceremonies. But when her wanderings are complete, Erdrich always comes home to the Midwest, answering a call only she can hear, responding to a language that’s as old as the land itself.
“The shared history, the mixture of backgrounds–it’s very familiar to me.” She thinks for a moment. “I get a lot just from my surroundings, and now I’m back here, near my family, close to the Red River Valley, where I grew up. I can visit the reservation where my mom is from. I feel more comfortable in this setting.”
It’s clear that Erdrich is finally very much at home.
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jreaves@tribune.com
