Hard to believe, but Erdrich just keeps getting better.
The eponymous Native American object vibrates powerfully—as both instrument and symbol—in this tenth volume in Erdrich’s epic Ojibwe saga.
The drum is found, in a New Hampshire farmhouse following a sudden death, by Faye Travers, a middleaged divorcée of mixed ethnic origin, whose complicated personal life dominates the novel’s expository opening section. She’s a former drug user, now living with her mother Elsie and sharing the duties of Elsie’s “estates business”; the lover of a moody German sculptor, and an assiduous observer and considerer of birds, other natural phenomena and persistent memories of her younger sister Netta’s accidental death in childhood. Reasoning that the drum—found among a white family’s possessions—was “stolen from our own people,” Faye absconds with it, then travels west with Elsie to the Ojibwe reservation to which they’ll return it. The drum then “tells” its story, in three interconnected narratives. The first details the sundering of “old Shaawano’s” family when his wife Anaquot, “burning” with love for another man, flees with her illegitimate baby and older daughter, inadvertently sacrificing a child’s life to a pack of starving wolves. The second relates further consequences of Anaquot’s folly, then tells how Shaawano, inspired and burdened by “visions” of a dead child, painstakingly fashions the drum (“a container for the spirit, just as if it were flesh and bone”). The third story reveals how, two generations later, the drum sounds again, and three children left alone in a freezing house and subsequently lost in frigid darkness, hear its “healing” music. Erdrich draws us into her exquisitely detailed world effortlessly, and even this novel’s frequent excesses of summary cannot blunt the power of its narrative ingenuity and luminous prose. The worlds of ancestry and tradition, humans and animals (notably, wolves and ravens), living and remembering and dreaming, are here rendered here with extraordinary clarity and insistent emotional impact.
Hard to believe, but Erdrich just keeps getting better.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-051510-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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