Will Byrnes's Reviews > LaRose

He was extremely adept, had started hunting small game with his grandfather at the age of seven. Landreaux took the shot with fluid confidence. When the buck popped away he realized he'd hit something else--there had been a blur the moment he squeezed the trigger. Only when he walked forward to investigate and looked down did he understand that he had killed his neighbor's son.

Louise Erdritch uses a wide palette. She draws a core event in strong lines, then brings together a diverse range of textures, shapes and colors, mixing, matching, highlighting, smudging, lightening and darkening to make an amazing picture, more mural than something readily contained inside a frame. We know from the little text that precedes the shooting that Landreaux Iron's family and Peter Ravich's family are close. Their wives are half-sisters. Their children play together. They share and trade with each other, and the families help each other out. Faced with the horror of Dusty Ravich's accidental death, Landeaux, seeking to atone, looks for guidance in tradition, and in a sweat lodge ceremony arrives at a solution. Landreaux and his wife, Emmaline, would give their son, LaRose, to the Raviches.


Louise Erdrich - from NPR

LaRose Iron is a very special eight-year-old, with a name that goes back generations. One of the brightest colors in LaRose is family history. The history which runs in his veins is manifest in kindness and wisdom far beyond his years. He's a great kid and you will love him. We see back to 1839, when the first LaRose was a girl, sold by her desperate mother for food. We follow her journey. There are looks back to the history of several other characters, with particular focus on their experiences in BIA schools.

I wanted to write something with LaRose, I had the title—I always have the title. The rest of the book really collects the stories, the language, the characters, they collect around the title. So I knew I would write about LaRose. I had forgotten, though, that there was a LaRose far back in our family history. I really don't know anything about this LaRose, but I know the approximate dates when she lived. So I constructed a historical set of LaRoses, and then I worked out the traumas and the difficulties and everything until we came to this LaRose.

We follow not only the travails of Landreaux, and LaRose having to cope with his abruptly different family situation, but with Emmaline Iron as she yearns to have her son back, and Peter and Nola Ravich as they grieve for their lost child and try to incorporate his replacement. There are wonderful characters beyond. Both the Irons and Raviches have daughters. Maggie Ravich, who we meet as barely a teen, is a particularly fierce and moving personality. Romeo Payat is a person of less than stellar character. He and Landreaux were friends once, but Romeo suffered physical damage as a result of an adolestent adventure Landreaux led, suffered emotional disappointment as well, and spends much of his waking life plotting his revenge. A local good guy of a cleric (carried over from The Round House) struggles with his mission, his sobriety, and his vows.

One of Louise Erdrich's many strengths as a novelist is that central to her work is the distinct hue of her Native American culture. Thus her 21st century characters incorporate ancient Ojibwe lore and religion in their lives, just as their 1839 ancestors did, including origin myths. There is considerable magical realism on display. Fantastical things, light and dark, take place. Disembodied, flaming heads pursue their killers. A starry spirit light flies to a welcoming womb and takes root. Astral projection is a reality, although not for all. One character is joined with an owl spirit with positive effects. Another is seen to be hanging out with the spirit of a lost friend. The lines between the material and the spectral have been nicely smudged. Guilt-driven hallucinations highlight several scenes. Did you see what I saw? Was that really there?

As she did in her previous opus magnum, The Round House, Erdrich mixes in a bit of sparkle in the form of secular cultural lore. In the last book, it was Star Trek NG. Here, kids quote from Blade Runner and reference robot flicks. Older Western culture colors the native experience as well. Xenophon's Anabasis and William Ernest Henley's poem Invictus tint the historical portraits.

Contemporary (1999-2002) reality offers up a rich store of material as well. The lie-based Operation Enduring Freedom finds an echo in personal behavior, with consideration of the benefits of disarmament. Y2K figures in as well, with one character going a bit Y2Krazy overpreparing. In a recent interview with Claire Hoffman for Goodreads, Erdrich says:

Well, the book really is about disaster in some ways. On the first page you thought something would happen, but not what did happen. And this is the same thing that happened with Y2K: We thought something would happen, everyone was prepared, and then what happened was 9/11.

Gripes? Well, only one, really. Erdrich yields to an impulse to insult one particular religious institution with a juvenile bit of low humor. Not that I do not enjoy some pre-ad yucks, and not that I am a huge fan of organized religion. But it seemed out of keeping with the rest of the book, without adding anything worthwhile.

There are some lines that run throughout that you might want to keep an eye on. Losing children (whether accidentally, or accidentally on purpose) is popular here, which certainly highlights the importance of community ties and maintaining a wide family network. Opacity of spirit darkens the scene for this or that character from time to time. (That's always the struggle—where is the balance between the decency and brutality? And that's a struggle that is embodied in Romeo. ) The challenges of coping with being dealt a lousy hand figure large. (I tried to not make it about grief and instead make it about the way people live.) But the primary line running through LaRose is redemption. Making things right, emotionally and spiritually if not always physically, is a challenge for more than just Landreaux.

Louise Erdrich not only tells amazing stories, she tells them with a lyricism, with a beauty that is rare, rich, textured, and ecstatic. She mixes the contemporary with the historical, wisdom with foolishness, crimes with punishments, individual and communal, guilt with redemption, violence with justice, beauty with ugliness, the mundane with the magical, tragedy with comedy. You might have to mentally step back a few paces, maybe take a spot on a cushioned bench far enough away from this large image to fully appreciate it. Then move closer to give individual sections a finer look. There is a lot to see, and all of it is wonderful. In a rare feat, Louise Erdich has followed one great book with another. LaRose is an outstanding novel, engaging, emotionally rewarding, and a definite must read.

Publication
----------May 10, 2016 (Hardcover)
----------April 18, 2017 (Trade Paperback)

Review most recently updated - March 28, 2025

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal and FB pages
Erdrich's personal site redirects to the site Birchbark Books. She owns the store.

The poem Invictus is cited in the book

As is Xenophon's Anabasis, an ancient tale of a great journey that informs the experiences of the first LaRose

Other Louise Erdrich novels I have reviewed
-----2024 - The Mighty Red
-----2021 - The Sentence
-----2020 - The Night Watchman
-----2017 - Future Home of the Living God
-----2010 - Shadow Tag
-----2012 - The Round House
-----2008 - The Plague of Doves
-----2005 - The Painted Drum

Don't miss Ron Charles's magnificent review of this book at the Washington Post

November 23, 2016 - LaRose is named to the NY Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2016

March 16, 2017 - LaRose wins the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction