'The Plague of Doves' by Louise Erdrich

A Novel

Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins: 314 pp., $25.95

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.