Louise Erdich gives us another jewel with ‘Four Souls’
When Louise Erdrich began her cycle of novels about the Ojibwe people of the Great Plains, she opened a treasure chest for readers. Now, with her ninth novel, “Four Souls,” she presents us with yet another jewel.
Erdrich, whose ancestors were Ojibwe, French, German and American, writes with a warrior’s heart and a poet’s voice. Listen to one of this book’s narrators speaking about time:
“Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. … For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin and brain? … Time pours into us and pours out again. In between the two pourings, we live our destiny.”
Her novels reach back and forth from time past to time present, exploring the cultures of and clashes between the Native Americans who first inhabited the land and the government agents and entrepreneurs who wrested it from them. The stories Erdrich tells are by turns shocking, heartbreaking, hilarious and bawdy. Her newest novel is no exception.
Revenge is what drives Fleur Pillager in “Four Souls.” Fleur first and most memorably appeared in Erdrich’s 1988 novel “Tracks,” an exquisite poem masquerading as prose. As her name implies, her strength lies in her remarkable beauty and rapacious anger.
In this book, set shortly after World War I, Fleur journeys on foot from her reservation in North Dakota to Minneapolis to recapture something precious that once rightfully belonged to her people: land.
Fleur, who has taken her mother’s name, Four Souls, for its mystical power, heads for the grand mansion of John James Mauser. He has made his fortune in lumber, acquired by marrying Ojibwe women, claiming the rights to their allotted woodlands, felling and selling the trees and then abandoning each bride for the next.
Fleur enters his home as a laundress, but soon becomes the healer who cures him of a malady resulting from his wartime service. Her fierce sense of honor requires her to make him whole before she can destroy him, but just when she might take bloody revenge, Mauser makes a promise that changes everything. Retribution will come, but in a way none of the characters can predict.
The story centers on Fleur, but she does not tell it. Two of the narrators are familiar from Erdrich’s previous novels: Gerry Nanapush, a tribal elder who is part wise man, part buffoon, and his common-law wife, the sensible Margaret Kashpaw. The new voice is Polly Elizabeth Gheen, spinster sister of Mauser’s current wife, Placide, a socialite who fancies herself an artist.
It is Polly who hires Fleur, at first lording it over “the squaw” but soon offering grudging respect, and later, genuine admiration. The main theme of “Four Souls” is revenge, the weapon that can wound the victor as grievously as the victim. Fleur gets hers, but at a huge cost. Nanapush does too, but risks nearly all he holds dear.
Another author might have exhausted her imagination and material long ago, but for Erdrich, and happily for her readers, the people of the Plains continue to offer inexhaustible riches.