Strings Of A Life Novelist Louise Erdrich Turns To Nonfiction Genre For A Reflection On Nature, Marriage And Motherhood

“The Blue Jay’s Dance” By Louise Erdrich (Harper Collins, 223 pages, $21)

‘Belles-lettres.” Literally, the term means “fine letters” or “beautiful writing.” Practically, it means the rather puny section of the bookstore where arty nonfiction is kept. Those shelves have a new and vibrant resident in Louise Erdrich’s “The Blue Jay’s Dance.” It is fine and beautiful writing indeed, as readers might expect from the author of such novels as “Love Medicine,” “The Beet Queen,” “Tracks” and “The Bingo Palace.”

The book begins in winter with the writer heavily pregnant and proceeds through the cycle of a year during which she has a baby and struggles to return to writing.

But it’s so much more than this. It’s about nature, wildlife, food (recipes included), marriage, creativity and, arching over all, motherhood.

We learn that Erdrich’s husband, writer Michael Dorris, has greatsmelling hair - she focuses on it during labor. Also, he is a great and gallant cook who has collected recipes “guaranteed to cool and soothe irascible women.” During a grouchy phase of late pregnancy, he makes his wife a miraculous lemon meringue pie; after the baby’s birth, as Erdrich struggles with depression and a difficult muse, he concocts a seven-course all-licorice dinner to saturate her senses (fennel and chicory salad, anise duck and wild rice casserole, fennel risotto, anise cakes, etc.).

In fact, Erdrich does not devote all that much of the book’s space to Dorris, or their relationship, but you feel he is always there somewhere.

She does not even devote that much of the book’s space to her children per se. But they - specifically her ties to them - are its core. The baby whose first year is documented here is not even really just one baby but an amalgam of all of Erdrich’s babies, an Everybaby whose charms and demands will be familiar to any parent.

In one memorable piece, Erdrich has gleaned strands of hair from her three youngest daughters, caught in their hairbrushes; she leaves the bundle of hairs outdoors near a tree stump, and, sure enough, come fall, she finds a tiny bird’s nest with the shining hairs in its tight weave.

Much of the book is taken up with narratives about the plant and animal life around Erdrich’s New Hampshire farmhouse and the little rented house across the way where she goes each day, baby in tow, to write. Nature writing generally bores me, but in Erdrich’s hand it is spellbinding.

A moth is a velvet spirit visiting by night; a fox is “a living question mark”; wild turkeys are “bundles of rags on stilts.”

She occasionally looks back - to her North Dakota childhood, to memories of her Ojibwa grandparents and, in one of my favorite bits, to a night spent by the moody 14-year-old girl in a sleeping bag in the middle of a football field, a skunk curled at her feet:

“I woke at dawn, stunned into that sprayed state of being… . My skunk was gone. I abandoned my sleeping bag and started home… . I walked in my own strange wind… . My emotions had seemed vast, dark, and sickeningly private. But they were minor, mere wisps, compared to skunk.”

What Erdrich does so masterfully throughout “The Blue Jay’s Dance” is tie together all the strings of her life - as a mother and wife, as a writer, as a creature of nature, as a human being with abstract notions and profound thoughts. All these strings tie her to the rest of us.

Here is just one of many lovely examples:

“I spread toys in a hazard-free trajectory across the carpet… . As I write I hear her dogged progress. This will last 15 minutes, until she explores the last toy, a musical bluebird with an orange beak and great black cartoon eyes. She has learned how to prop herself, how to swivel on her stomach, but she can’t crawl, not yet. Instead, she lunges. She props herself on her arms and pushes with her knees, lands with a solid thump, pushes up, and throws herself again and again toward the toy. It is a paradigm of something, I think, idly, pausing to study her absolute striving concentration, but what? Turning back to this page, I know. It is what I am doing now. My face is hers. Unyielding eagerness. That is her work, just as this page is my play, just as all this is our life. It is what we do, afraid and avid, full of desire, hurling ourselves again and again toward the musical object.”