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New & Noteworthy
April 2001 Atlantic Monthly
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich's new novel stretches to include such lofty topics as gender-bending, cross-cultural fusion, and the nature of miracles, but winds up hopelessly tangled in its own ambitions. Set on a North Dakota reservation, it depicts the life of Agnes DeWitt, a young nun who disguises herself as a Catholic priest after leaving her convent because she plays Chopin too soulfully. She miraculously shrouds her sex for the next eighty years, gently ministering to her unsuspecting flock as they endure plagues of disease, alcohol, and government chicanery. This promising setup is marred by Erdrich's inability to achieve an effectively consistent narrative tone. At times she is cloyingly melodramatic, such as when Agnes engages in a risky affair with a visiting young priest with movie-star looks. At others she is lowly comic, employing such set pieces as the slapstick hunt for an amorous moose and the bawdy funeral of a tumescent old medicine man. A subplot involving a local nun up for canonization never really catches fire. Only when Erdrich focuses on the lives of the native women who fight against the poverty and abuse that are their birthright does her narrative come to life. Erdrich's prose is equally unstable. Although she occasionally achieves an admirable lyricism, she also creates passages on which one might stumble while waiting in the supermarket check-out line—such as when a besotted farmer "let his seed onto the floor" upon seeing Agnes naked, and the response her Chopin playing elicits among her fellow nuns: "Sometimes a pause between the piercing sorrows of minor notes made a sister scrubbing the floor weep into the bucket where she dipped her rag so that the convent's boards, washed in tears, seemed to creak now in a human tongue." The floorboards, it would seem, aren't all that's creaking. —Stephen Amidon
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From Atlantic UnboundAn Emissary of the Between-WorldA conversation with Louise Erdrich, whose stories occur in the "margin where cultures mix and collide" |
