A shot resounds

It has been difficult to come back from this novel to the familiar atmosphere of my daily life. I have been through this before with Louise Erdrich, who weaves exotic and erotic spells with her writing. She gets better and better. If her first book, "Love Medicine," was a concerto, then ever since "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse," she has been composing symphonies filled with a complex wisdom about the strands of darkness and light that make up a human life.

"The Plague of Doves" is a multi-generational novel-in-stories of the intertwined lives of the whites in the town of Pluto, N.D., and the Native Americans and mixed-blood Metis people of French ancestry who live on the reservation surrounding it. Moving back and forth in time, four narrators take turns uncovering layer after layer of past and present.

The novel opens with a shotgun blast that will reverberate through all their lives and connect them in breathtaking, sometimes shocking ways. When the first narrator, Evelina, talks with her grandfather, Mooshum, about her fascination with her teacher, Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, he twists his mouth at the sound of her name. He has always regaled Evelina and her brother with stories of his past adventures, which change with each telling. But the story he tells now is a grim one, and Erdrich does not spare them (or us) from visualizing in detail a horrible crime.

In 1911, two Indian teenagers, Mooshum and Paul Holy Track, along with Paul's guardian Asiginak, come across the bodies of a murdered farm family and tragically become the prime suspects. The three are strung up on an oak tree, but Mooshum is inexplicably cut down, the only survivor. We won't find out until much later the significant detail he has omitted from the story.

The next narrator, Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who will marry Evelina's aunt, talks about his grandfather Joseph, who joined the town-site expedition that resulted in Pluto. The two Metis guides saved his life. Their younger brother Cuthbert will be one of the lynching victims, and a descendant, Billy Peace, will marry Marn Wolde and found a cult on her father's farm, the site of that killing tree. Marn narrates the story of her marriage and how, with the aid of the snakes she handles, she escapes from the commune with her children. In synopsis, the plot lines seem operatic, but Erdrich's artistry and passion had me believing every word. Evelina returns as a university student with dreams of going to France. A bad drug trip, thanks to her dealer cousin Corwin Peace, and the unbearable experience of falling in love with a girl, only to be abandoned, sends her into a total breakdown. We are so deeply inside Evelina that we feel her sick despair, to the point of claustrophobia. The last narrator, Dr. Cordelia Lochren, sends us back to that farm family, whose killer was never identified, until she adds up a few things that happened in her practice and realizes who it was.