In Shadow Tag, her 13th novel, Louise Erdrich focuses on the faltering marriage of Irene and Gil, and it's impossible not to wonder how much of the novel is informed by her own troubles (Erdrich's husband, Michael Dorris, committed suicide in 1997 as the two were in the middle of an acrimonious divorce).
The novel begins in 2007, and moves forward and backward in time, a typical structure for an Erdrich novel. Gil is a painter and Irene is his subject. They are both native Americans, although Gil is undocumented and belongs to no band. Irene is the mother of their three children and has been trying for years to complete a PhD on George Catlin, a 19th-century painter of native Americans. So familiar Erdrich subjects resonate: the history of indigenous peoples and the ghastly problems they have faced since the Europeans landed.
Like the people whom Catlin painted, Irene has become suspicious of her husband's depictions of herself. His successful career is built on the appropriation of her body for his aesthetic purposes. But Irene is rejecting being used as a subject - and thereby object - and the couple is trapped in a hostile yet passionate partnership, which Irene wants to escape and to which Gil clings desperately even though he knows his wife no longer loves him: "He could see it in the opacity of her eyes, the insolence of her flesh, the impatient weariness of her body when she let down her guard. She'd ceased to love him. Her gaze was an airless void."
The children are caught in their parents' war, and Erdrich does a heartbreakingly beautiful job of demonstrating that love, or some version of it, does not prevent verbal or physical abuse. Irene tries to protect her children, but she has limited resources. The children try to protect their mother, and while they are afraid of their father, they love him. Six-year-old Stoney has his father's artistic talent, 13-year-old Florian is a math genius, and the middle daughter is named Riel after "a poet whose visions of an Indian nation died in the bloody snow at a place called Batoche." At the age of 11, Riel decides she must save her family. One of the ways she tries is through her own writing.
In typical Erdrich fashion, the novel has multiple narrators. But Shadow Tag adds a complex dimension to the story. Once Irene finds out that Gil has been snooping in her journal, she starts to lie in it for the sole purpose of causing Gil excruciating pain. She also keeps a real journal hidden in a safety deposit box. The novel is unflinching in its revelations about the lengths to which a husband and wife can go in their combat. And both Gil and Irene rely heavily on alcohol, which only exacerbates their problems. The cruelty they inflict on each other is shocking and absolutely believable.
Also in typical Erdrich fashion, love and family can save a person. But Gil and Irene do not belong to an extended family, an emptiness that mirrors the larger one many indigenous people experience. Isolation is clearly destructive, and readers of Erdrich's novels will immediately see the challenges facing Gil and Irene because of the lack of a larger family framework. Irene's discovery of a half-sister (with the unsettling name of Louise) helps somewhat, but the devastation is complete. Each family member suffers disaster, and Erdrich creates suspense until the last few pages. Because of the multiple narrators, the ending manages both to surprise and to appear the only possible conclusion.
Shadow Tag is the verbal equivalent of carpet-bombing. Gil and Irene are locked in an incendiary battle that scorches them and their children. They are educated, intelligent, gifted people whose crippled relationship spreads misery in an ever-widening circle. Their desperation is monstrous, and Louise Erdrich's presentation of it is formidable.
Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College in Victoria.