It’s human nature to want people to like what you like, but when they resist, pointing to reasons they should like it is like explaining a joke. No laughing, no liking. Such it is with my friend and Louise Erdrich. I’m a HUGE fan of Louise. I consider her among the top five living writers in the country, perhaps the top ten in the world. If you took the trouble, as few do, to scroll through the archives of writerworking.net, you’d see how highly I regard her work and why. Yet, I hadn’t read the 1997 work The Antelope Wife. When my friend, who has never warmed to Louise for some reason, was assigned Antelope in a class and said “didn’t like it,” I of course had to dig in. Now I’m not going to claim that this is equal to masterpieces like The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (See my Dec, 2006 commentary.) or The Master Butcher’s Singing Club. However, it’s an intense, mystifying, and life-affirming read. I’ll admit there are some weak places--an unfortunate gag scene with stick-on gift bows that nearly sinks to sitcom level, for example; and an equally unfortunate sequence from the point of view of a dog named (for obvious reasons) Almost Soup. However, who can resist writing like this? “Dusted all over like an egg with freckles, Peace McKnight. . .was sturdily made as a captain’s chair, yet drew water with graceful wrists and ran dancing across the rutted mud on curved white ankles. . . . At night, the kerosene lamplight in trembling rings and haloes, Miss Peace McKnight felt the eyes of Scranton Roy carve her in space.” Stuff like that all the way through. Like most of Erdrich’s work, Antelope Wife’s chronology is disjointed, a metaphor, I believe for the non-liner, organic way we experience time and life. Events from the beginning of the more than one hundred years of the book’s history appear in the final pages, events from the late nineteen nineties appear in the beginning. And the sequences are jumbled in between. In this case, she makes the metaphor concrete with two broken strings of beads--one of blue stones, the other of red, so that the scatter of events is matched by the scattering of the beads. Ditto with the treatment of characters. Again, this mixture of time and space and people is usual for Erdrich, but here she complicates it even more with duplicate names. There are three generations of twin girls with identical names, and we’re often not quite sure which generation we’re reading about. This confusion is neither accidental nor is it literary trickery. It echoes life’s difficulty in stringing together the scattered elements of life. The book begins with a cavalry nineteenth-century raid/massacre on a defenseless Indian village. Scranton Roy (mentioned above in the quoted description) is a soldier who commits an atrocity during that raid, then performs a humanitarian act of equal weight in saving the life of an infant who is carried away on the back of frightened dog. By the time he catches up with the dog, he is far away from the village and his unit and he never goes back. Still, the humanitarian act turns into an atrocity when he from one point of view saves the child and gives it a home, from another point of view steals the child from its mother and people. This Hegleian interaction of good and evil, animal/human continues throughout the book and down through the generations that Scranton Roy begets. The above summary is way too prosaic, though, for it leaves out the element of magic. Many authors cross into the fantastical, but Erdrich lives there. A father nurses two children. Girls are raised by antelope and deer. People stare into rivers and find themselves swimming with underwater spirits. It also leaves out the comedy, of which there is plenty. Ribald, profane, dangerous, and deeply serious comedy of the kind that makes you laugh while people die naked. If you want to read this for the history or sociology, there’s plenty of that, too. You’ll find a depiction of the Native American migration to and from the cities and the interaction between reservation Indians and urban ones. Louise even brings the Hmong into the mix, one of the latest additions to the incredible racial stew we are preparing in America. Throughout, despite the horrible things people do to one another, the women sew constantly, threading the beads of their lives and culture into taut strings, making patterns of the loose beads, trying to make sense of the the “. . . longing [that] makes us do the things that we should not. Even longing for the good. For loive. Longing is the bliss of thieves that getting kills.” I don’t suppose this will make my friend like the book any better, but maybe it will convince her it has more worth than she first thought.
Louise Erdrich is a novelist of Ojibwa descent who magically, seamlessly weaves together white and native culture in her works, as they are marked in her skin, mind, and spirit. When we part their leaves, her books let us peer into the branches of a vast family tree that precariously balances the two major cultures of her heritage, anachronistically telling the tales of folks whose ultimate truth is repeated over and over, generation to generation, though the land changes around them, and their culture with it.I had enjoyed her mystical novels Tracks and Love Medicine before, and relished The Antelope Wife immensely, too, watching the family stories blossom like the grail of a honeysuckle bloom, sweet with every sip. The family legends in The Antelope Wife, blending with Ojibwa tales, are all sewn together with the threads of love, truth, and fate--the inevitable and the purity of not resisting it. Erdrich better made me understand love, pure love, the way in which my own significant other and I are bound, a way, as she writes, "a new way, a way she's never been told about." Through Erdrich's words I experienced all of the joys and pains of true love, one after another, leaving me as breathless as if he and I had just made love, as full of laughter and memory as if we had just shared our secret soul-seeing smile.
What do You think about The Antelope Wife (1998)?
After being blown away by the first book I read of Louise Erdrich's (The Round House), I was pretty disappointed in this one. There were parts that I really liked, but then those parts were over too quickly. I didn't like how Erdrich flipped back and forth between multiple characters' POV—sometimes this can work, but in this case each of those sections were too brief to really get a feel for their personalities. I also felt that the overall themes were either too basic that I was looking for something more, or too high-level that I just "didn't get it." Plus, I didn't know who exactly was/were the protagonist(s) of the novel. I felt myself rooting for characters who were not viewed very sympathetically by other characters, so overall I just felt confused. Despite her name being the novel's title, the character of the Antelope Wife didn't seem as central to the plot as she could have been; her entire existence was very surreal, as were many events in the book. Sometimes this surrealism/magic realism can work for me, but often I am just not a fan of it. I am still planning on reading much more of Erdrich's work (since I absolutely loved The Round House), so I hope I am not this disappointed again.
—Amy
I read Love Medicine a little while ago for another class about Native American culture and literature and I've gotten around to this one for a new class. The problem I've found with assigning Louise Erdrich novels is that her characters, themes and magical realism are too complex to the point of being inaccessable to busy students like myself, and the end result ends up being me being weirded out by trippy imagery and men breastfeeding without more discussion. That being said, the novel might be inaccessible and confusing, but wow is it interesting. This book almost requires being reread at a slower pace and lots of patience. It's compelling, even if it's a lot like Love Medicine, and it has the wonderful poetic language to keep you reading like that book kept my attention.
—Jesse Zellmer
I needed a break from all the serious stuff I have been reading lately so I picked this up last night. I was hoping good things for this one. I had tried reading Louise Erdrich before and I just couldn't get into her stories, with the exception of one I picked up years ago.The Antelope Wife caught my attention from the first page, with the story of the twins. It weaves myth and everyday life into a story that spans nearly 100 years, beginning with a man named Scanton Roy. The consequences of his actions during and after an military attack on a Native village reverberate through his and two other families down to modern times. There were a few places in the story where I am glad I was alone - I'm sure if anyone heard me laugh, they would have thought I was crazy (the bows! Oh, the bows and sparkler! :-D) There were also a few places in the story where the images sparked my own imagination. I am glad I gave this author and book a chance.
—Azra
