“Matters of Justice”

"Matters of Justice”

LOUISE ERDRICH ’76

KEVIN NANCE

IT’S A SMALL WORLD, THE WORLD OF LOUISE It's a small world, the world of Louise Erdrich’s novels. Almost all of them are set in and around the same Native American reservation in North Dakota, with some characters from one book returning in another, traversing the same physical and emotional landscape. Yet within the confines of that patch of earth, Erdrich finds both endless variety of theme and incident and, more important, a universality that arises from and then transcends the specific. The author’s people and places may be superficially different from our own, but in all the ways that matter, they are more than like us. They are us.

In her new novel, LaRose, we experience once again the surprise, the pleasure and sometimes the pain of recognizing ourselves in this fictional universe. It’s about Landreaux, a hunter who tries to atone for having accidentally killed his best friend’s son by sending his own 5-year-old son, LaRose, to live with the bereaved family. This proves a flawed plan at best, especially when one of Landreaux’s old enemies, Romeo—the latest in a long line of Erdrich’s great comic villains—tries to convince the dead child’s father that the death was no accident.

As the author told me in a profile of her for this magazine last year, LaRose delves “deeply into matters of justice.” An implicit meditation on right and wrong, crime and punishment, mercy and revenge, LaRose shares a thematic bloodline with its predecessors, The Plague of Doves, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award-winning The Round House. But unlike those books, which turn in part on the American and tribal legal systems and their failures, LaRose stays fixed on a higher law, the law of the human heart—what we need to survive in a world of hurt.

KEVIN NANCE is a Chicago-based freelance writer and regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Poets & Writers magazine. He profiled Erdrich in the Jan-Feb 2015 issue of DAM.

ARIANNA VAIRO