Long, Difficult History Erdrich’s Book Follows The Lives Of Four Families As They Become Intertwined In Unique Ways

“The Antelope Wife” Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, $24, 240 pp.)

With stitches invisible as time and beads bright as day and dark as night, two sisters sit sewing. Each tries to command the pattern, to set more beads than her twin. Each is trying to control the balance of the world.

With that mystical image, Louise Erdrich sets the mesmerizing pattern of her sixth novel, “The Antelope Wife.” The story begins in the late 1800s, in a My Lai-like maelstrom of blood and dust as a U.S. Cavalry officer bayonets an old Ojibwa woman.

“Daashkikaa, daashikaa” the dying woman cries. And indeed, the village’s world is “cracked apart.”

Over the course of the next century, Erdrich shows us how the lives of descendants of that soldier and those of the old woman intertwine, in unexpected ways.

Erdrich possesses one of the most original voices in contemporary American fiction. Her subject is the long, difficult and still-evolving history of American Indians, particularly the Ojibwa in Minnesota and the Dakotas. (She herself is descended from the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwa and also has German ancestry.)

Her style is a gorgeous tapestry that combines the ancient voices of storytellers, vivid evocations of the natural world, deep appreciation of the ironies of the human heart and surprisingly bawdy humor. “The Antelope Wife” has all these qualities and more.

The soldier, Scranton Roy, takes the old woman’s life but saves another - an infant girl strapped to a cradle board decorated with blue glass beads and borne by a village dog. Captivated by the abandoned child, he nurtures her in the most primal and miraculous way, at his own breast.

Later, the child’s bereft and maddened mother will bear two more daughters - twins whose lifetimes span the scope of this story. The rescued child, graceful as a gazelle, ultimately finds her spiritual home with the fleet and curious antelope who roam the northern plains. Her legacy reappears in another kidnapping, this one in modern times.

Beads, which represent heritage, hope, art and native ways, and dogs as rescuers, confidants, commentators and even - be warned - as sustenance recur throughout this story. As do twin girls, who appear in each generation as the four families whose story Erdrich tells come together in episodes of love and surpassing sorrow.

Erdrich’s forte is inventing fascinating female characters, and she creates some new ones here. They include Blue Prairie Woman, the matriarch of the clan that will include the “antelope wife” and the twin sisters, Zosie and Mary.

These feisty, funny old grandmas, at one time the young lovers of the same man, keep one foot in the old ways and the other in sneakers, dispensing wisdom in between bites of whippedcream cakes. They in turn - though exactly which one remains a mystery to the end of the book - produced Rozina, mother of Deanna and Cally.

Rozin, as she is known, links the Roy, Whiteheart Beads and Shawano clans as descendant of one, wife of another, lover of a third. Her daughter, Cally, a young woman of the generation that is shedding the old ways, serves as narrator of much of the story.

But Erdrich also creates some interesting men. Scranton Roy appears briefly but is sharply drawn. Klaus Shawano, a trader with a German first name, and his brother, Frank, a baker whose lifelong quest is reproducing a German cake called a “blitzkuchen,” are good men who sometimes behave badly. Richard Whiteheart Beads brings tragedy down on his family and himself. And “the windigo dog,” as Klaus dubs him, is a savvy and sardonic pup who is one of the cleverest commentators in the novel.

Anyone who has followed Erdrich’s career will be wondering if her own recent family tragedy - her husband, author Michael Dorris, killed himself last year amid divorce proceedings and allegations of child abuse - cast a shadow on this novel.

In a brief preface, Erdrich says it did not, noting that “The Antelope Wife” was written before Dorris’ death. Still, Erdrich has drawn inspiration for her fiction from her own history before and may well do so again. If she does, combining her commanding voice with the power of her personal pain, that will be a formidable book indeed.