Shadow Tag (review)

"She loved small disasters."

Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag can be read as a roman à clef, or, perhaps more appropriately, a novel of ideas. Portraying successful Native American characters who live in a midwestern urban area, it also comments on the operation of culture at large, of zeitgeist. A bold, uncensored snapshot of a marriage in trouble, it nevertheless selectively presents only part of the story at any given time, deliberately skirting the full complexity of the situation. Fame and shame, image and appropriation, free will and fate battle it out between the covers. Divided into five sections, each shorter than the previous—suggesting an inexorable scaling back to essence—Shadow Tag traces the inevitable dissolution of a family. Meaning arises from happenstance, neglect, and coincidence in this elliptical yet suspenseful narrative, and in that respect this book, despite its many surface differences from Erdrich's previous novels, enhances many of their major tenets.

The story of Native American writer Irene America, who is researching nineteenth-century portrait artist George Catlin for her dissertation, and her husband, Gil, an artist who has built a successful career from painting portraits of Irene, Shadow Tag abounds with distorted reflections, appropriated images, and eerie doubles. More simply, it shows a great but mystifying love between a disturbed and occasionally violent man and a woman who wants to escape for the sake of her children. Unfortunately she can't fight the caretaker instinct within herself to let go of a potentially self-destructive man.

Although readers might be tempted to see art imitating life, Erdrich mischievously distorts her fictional representations, throwing in a few red herrings for good measure. For instance, just as we reflexively fall into the assumption that Irene is the fictive counterpart to the author, Erdrich introduces a character named Louise. In a sense, she's commenting on the reality that famous authors must maintain public images, even as they strive to protect individual privacy. In another nod to deliberate artifice, Part Two contains vicious, fanciful renditions of the couple's visits to a therapist, openly referred to by Gil as a "functionary." Similarly, in a climatic showdown, the family's housecat is described as disappearing "like a stage ghost." In the end, part of Erdrich's achievement with this novel, heightened by her conscious subversion of reality, is to write over sensationalistic journalism with wicked imagination and her trademark humor.

Set in the Mount Curve neighborhood of Minneapolis, a wealthy enclave of historic mansions overlooking downtown, Shadow Tag portrays two prosperous, professional, urban, midwestern Native Americans and their children, telling an echo story of the setting more often featured in Erdrich's novels, rural North Dakota. Shadow Tag is not the novel in stories of, say, The Plague of Doves, nor does it mix narrative viewpoints to the extent of, say, Love Medicine. The plot is relatively linear, consisting largely of omniscient narrative fragments describing Irene's thoughts and actions. However, external textual elements inform and interrupt this narrative, as in Erdrich's previous novels, here in the form of diary excerpts. When Irene discovers that Gil secretly reads her private journal, rather than confront him with the truth she decides to falsify entries, so as to throw him off his guard. Leaving this red notebook in its usual place, she opens up a safe deposit box at her local bank, where she writes her true feelings in a blue notebook. The notion of split selves recorded in color-coded journals is a sly nod to the groundbreaking feminist novel The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. This device also alludes to the deliberate deceptiveness of Anaïs Nin, whose journals Evelina Harp reads in The Plague of Doves. In a collage format harkening to Erdrich's other novels, excerpts from Irene's two journals alternate with the main narrative, along with occasional shifts of focus to the three children: the youngest, Stoney; the oldest, Florian; and, notably, the middle child, Riel. Like her namesake, Louis Riel, a leader of the Métis in their struggle for independence and sovereignty, this Riel plans...