Review by New York Times Review
The first lurch comes four lines in. A woman named Irene America is writing in her diary - or, rather, in one of her diaries. She is keeping two: one real, one fake. "You gave me the first book in order to record my beginning year as a mother," she writes. "It was very sweet of you." "It was very sweet of you." Something about that sentence is off. Could it be the faintness of the praise? The flatness of the tone? Perhaps it's that the person being addressed is meant never to see these words, because we're glimpsing the blue notebook in which Irene records her true thoughts and feelings. She keeps it in a safe deposit box at the bank, away from the prying eyes of her husband, the "you" of those early lines. The other notebook, the red diary, is kept in a filing cabinet in her basement office at home. Irene knows her husband has been reading it in secret, and she contrives to use it as a weapon, setting down lies meant to torment him, to smoke him out and ultimately to free herself from their marriage. "Shadow Tag" is, as its publisher declares, unlike any other Louise Erdrich novel. That isn't to say it's devoid of the Native American themes that permeate her many previous books. Both Irene and her husband, Gil, are of Indian heritage. Raised by a white mother, Gil clings to his paternal "mishmash of Klamath and Cree and landless Montana Chippewa." Irene also grew up with a single mother, in her case a political activist who "dragged her to everything Ojibwe." Their shared culture closely informs both their careers. Gil, an artist, paints portraits of his wife, often in "cruel" or "humiliating" poses evocative of the history of whites' mistreatment of Indians. ("She appeared raped, dismembered, dying of smallpox in graphic medical detail.") Indeed, Gil envisions the series - which has become both famous and lucrative, and which he's named after his wife: "America 1," "America 2" and so on - as representing "the iconic suffering of a people." Irene is a historian. Or she would be if she hadn't stalled partway through her Ph.D. thesis on Louis Riel, "the depressed métis patriot." When the novel begins, she's at work on a new study, of George Catlin, "the 19th-century painter of Native Americana," whose subjects, she reminds herself, "would sicken and die soon after" he finished their portraits. YET Gil and Irene's ancestral ties are overshadowed by the corrosive way their identities have become grafted together. Gil's livelihood hinges on rendering and selling images of his wife's naked body. Irene's initial thesis subject was "distantly related" to Gil's family, and her current one is an obvious analogue for her painter husband, who she feels has drained the life from her. "I wonder how you can make love to me," she writes in her blue notebook. "I am a dead woman whose reflexes alone can be activated." Later, during one of their verbal sparring matches, Gil reinforces this impression. To Irene's accusation that he is painting kitsch, he retorts: "No, Irene. I'm painting death." This is one of their more tender exchanges. More often, they are engaged in hostilities, both stealthy and outright. Irene locks the door when she takes a bath. Gil has Irene followed. Irene photographs a bruise Gil has given their older son. Gil stabs his palms and makes bloody handprints on a portrait of Irene. Irene punches Gil in the head so hard she almost knocks him over. Gil pitches empty vodka bottles out the window at Irene. They drink and drink and drink. And both fantasize, with a numbing repetitiveness, about their own deaths - and those of others. An introductory note that accompanied early copies of the novel declared that Erdrich wrote this book "straight on," as "a single, gripping narrative," and it does have a headlong quality. Although not especially short, the novel has a pace that's mercifully fast. But what to make of the publisher's claim, which isn't intrinsically positive? To be sure, in places, "Shadow Tag" seems more like notes for a novel than fully realized fiction. ("The tragic irony of it offended him." "His outlook was sentimental while hers was tragic." "They might hate each other, at least, Irene might hate Gil, while he had no idea how much he hated Irene because he was so focused on winning back her love.") Elsewhere, though, Erdrich's unbridled urgency yields startlingly original phrasing ("the christbirthing pinecone air") as well as flashes of blinding lucidity. When Irene, admiring her youngest child's drawings of her, inquires about the "stick with a little half-moon" that always appears at the end of her hand, the first grader replies simply: "The wineglass." When Gil is in a rage, one of their dogs urinates on his shoe, and Irene feels "a sudden jolt of pride in the dog." But we miss something if we approach this book simply as fiction. "Shadow Tag" is a portrait of an "iconic" marriage on its way to dissolution. And Louise Erdrich has been in just such a marriage. Irene, more than a decade younger than Gil, plays a vital role in his work and he in hers. Erdrich's former husband, the writer Michael Dorris, was a decade older than she, and both referred regularly in interviews to the extraordinary intensity with which they collaborated. We see threads of child abuse and depression in Gil and Irene's collapsing union. Erdrich and Dorris separated amid allegations of child abuse, and a year and a half later Dorris committed suicide - a desperate act, Erdrich later revealed, that had preoccupied him for years. It's a fool's errand to parse fact from fiction. Even given such glaring similarities, to acknowledge them in a review would seem prurient, loathsome - if Erdrich hadn't seeded her narrative with what feels like an imperative to do so. Partway through the novel, she introduces a new character, a half-sister Irene has never previously known about. An artist who is an old friend of Gil's, this woman occupies a kind of idealized neutral territory; she bears some allegiance to both spouses and enmity toward neither. The role she assumes at the end of the book, when Irene and Gil may not be able to save themselves, let alone their children, is one of redemption, almost of salvation. And in a book where "a soul could be captured through a shadow," a portrait is a double released into the world and being someone's namesake matters, Erdrich has called this half-sister Louise. The novel's final chapters contain a series of shocks that resound both thematically within the context of the narrative and - for the considerable number of readers who will come to this book well versed in the publicized details of Erdrich's own life - beyond the page. I won't hazard a guess at how literally we are meant to interpret these twists and revelations. But the character to whom, in the end, Erdrich assigns all agency, all authorial power, changes our understanding of everything that has come before. The choice feels wistful, possibly noble and almost unbearably sad. The heroine of Erdrich's new novel uses her diary as a weapon, setting down lies she knows her husband will read. Leah Hager Cohen, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, teaches at the College of the Holy Cross.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 7, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Erdrich steps out of the deep river of her great Native American saga, last manifest in The Plague of Doves (2008), and into a feverish drama of a marriage and household in peril. The intensity of this exquisite, character-driven tale, its searing efficiency in encompassing the painful legacy of the Native American genocide, and its piercing insights into sex, family, and power are breathtaking. Irene America, of Ojibwe descent, hopes to complete her doctorate in history in spite of the demands of her volatile painter husband, Gil, and their three children: sons Florian, a secretive math prodigy, and gentle little Stoney, and daughter Riel, named after Louis Riel, a Metis resistance leader. Irene's subject is the nineteenth-century artist George Catlin, whose portraits of Native Americans raise disturbing questions about exploitation. As do Gil's erotic paintings of Irene, icons of violation born of his maniacal possessiveness, violent rage, and paranoia. Once Irene, who is drinking heavily, realizes that Gil is reading her diary, she begins writing entries calculated to push him to the brink. As their domestic civil war escalates, Irene remembers her mother's stories about how a soul can be captured through a shadow, a vision with profound implications in this masterfully concentrated and gripping novel of image and conquest, autonomy and love, inheritance and loss.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Erdrich's bleak latest (after The Plague of Doves) chronicles the collapse of a family. Irene America is a beautiful, introspective woman of Native American ancestry, struggling to finish her dissertation while raising three children. She is married to Gil, a painter whose reputation is built on a series of now iconic portraits of Irene, but who can't break through to the big time, pigeonholed as a Native American painter. Irene's fallen out of love with Gil and discovers that he's been reading her diary, so she begins a new, hidden, diary and uses her original diary as a tool to manipulate Gil. Erdrich deftly alternates between excerpts from these two diaries and third-person narration as she plots the emotional war between Irene and Gil, and Gil's dark side becomes increasingly apparent as Irene, fighting her own alcoholism, struggles to escape. Erdrich ties her various themes together with an intriguing metaphor-riffing on Native American beliefs about portraits as shadows and shadows as souls-while her steady pacing and remarkable insight into the inner lives of children combine to make this a satisfying and compelling novel. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Irene America is a smart, beautiful Minneapolis Ojibwe. Too distracted to finish her doctoral degree, she musters the emotional resources needed to keep two journals. The "Red Diary" is bait, filled with adulterous scenes that Irene uses to push volatile artist husband Gil close enough to the brink that he'll leave her. She unleashes all her rage and frustration in the "Blue Notebook," which she keeps in a bank deposit box. Meanwhile, Gil believes that his obsessive graphic paintings of Irene will somehow lure her back to him. Caught in the crosshairs of their parents' cruel, messy unraveling are 13-year-old Florian, a genius who models his mother's excessive drinking habits; Riel, 11, who believes that only she can hold her disintegrating family together; and sunny little Stoney. VERDICT Erdrich's latest is a brilliant cautionary tale of the shocking havoc willfully destructive, self-centered spouses wreak not only upon themselves but also upon their children. Reading it is like watching a wildfire whose flames are so mesmerizingly beautiful that it's almost easy to ignore the deadly mess left behind. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/09.]-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Taking a risky leap, Erdrich sets aside the magical-realist style of her many volumes about the Ojibwes (The Red Convertible, 2008 etc.) to write a domestic tragedy set among sophisticated, assimilated, highly educated and successful Native Americans. Gil and Irene live with their kids Florian, Riel and Stony in a seemingly idyllic home in Minneapolis. Gil is a renowned painter, Irene the subject of his graphically revealing portraits. Also a gifted historian, she is currently doing research for her doctorate dissertation about the painter George Catlin. Self-consciously aware of their heritage, Gil (raised in poverty by his white mother after his Native American father's death in Vietnam) and Irene (given a middle-class upbringing by her AIM activist mother) know that observers consider them an iconic couple. But Gil has a habit of brutalizing the children he cherishes, and Irene cannot relinquish the glass of wine always in her hand to protect them. When Irene realizes that Gil has been reading her diary, she feels her soul has been invaded. She begins writing entries to play with his mind, torturing him about an affair he imagines she is having. Obsessed with his love for Irene, Gil thinks that he wants to save the marriage. Irene thinks that she wants to free herself from Gil. Both are lying to themselves. Erdrich's unsparing prose dissects these two deeply flawed characters to show their ugliest selves, yet she allows them each their moments of joy and spiritual respite alone, together and with their children. Into this deeply personal novel about marriage, family and individual identity, she also weaves broader questions about cause and effect in historyspecifically the effect Catlin's painting of Native Americans had on them and on himthat resonate within her characters' lives. Readers familiar with Erdrich's personal life may suspect she has written close to the bone here, but she manages the rare achievement of rising above the facts she has incorporated to create a small masterpiece of compelling, painfully moving fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
