We all sing together

Page 22

The Master Butchers Singing Club

By Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins

389 pages

$39.95 (hc)

Chippewa writer Louise Erdrich usually writes about Aboriginal people in her novels, which detail the interconnected lives of the Morrissey, Kashpaw, Lamartine, Lazarre, Nanapush, and Pillager families of North Dakota. In her eighth novel, using her own German-American ancestors as inspiration, Erdrich turns to non-Native characters.

The Master Butchers Singing Club begins with Fidelis Waldvogel, a sniper in the German Army who returns home after the First World War and marries Eva, the pregnant girlfriend of his best friend, who was killed in the war. Fidelis, trained as a master butcher, then sets off to find his fortune in America-and ends up in Argus, N.D. Fidelis, opens a butcher shop in the town, sends for Eva, and their lives eventually intersect with Delphine Watzka, a young woman who becomes Eva's confidante and a surrogate mother to her four sons. The novel follows Fidelis, Eva, Delphine, and the Waldvogel boys through the next 36 years, as they build their lives, face death, and learn to love.

Those familiar with Erdrich's other novels will recognize some of the settings in this book, but will meet entirely new characters. The good news is that Erdrich's non-Native characters are just as interesting as her Native ones. The Master Butchers Singing Club is filled with the usual cast of colorful Erdrichean individuals: an outcast garbage picker, an incorrigible alcoholic, a mean-spirited spinster, a traveling showman, and a feminist undertaker, among others. (The showman is Delphine's sometime lover, Cyprian Lazarre. He is one of two Native characters in the book, both of whom are important to the story but rather marginal in its telling.)

Like the previous novels, this book shifts back and forth among various narrative voices, but it features a much flatter and more linear timeline than any of Erdrich's other books. At one point, the author careens from a discussion of kids' toys to Fidelis's sausages to her school days with her undertaker friend in less than one page. But that accelerated pace also makes certain scenes- when one of the Waldvogel boys is trapped inside a mound of construction dirt, when Eva needs pain medicine for her cancer- stand out in sudden intensity. Their importance is highlighted by their incremental, concentrated sensibility.

Erdrich uses a blend of poetic language, surreal circumstances, and humor to convey the intricate connections of small towns: the debts, the secrets, the public and private faces, the assigned roles. As she reveals those connections, she shows the balance people must strike between happiness and misery, killing and living, and life and death.

Fidelis's cronies in the Argus singing club are of different nationalities. They sing together and share songs from their cultures.

All of the seemly disparate ideas in the book come together when Erdrich reveals the identity of the most accomplished master butcher, and the choir she conducts in the sky. The truth is, we sing alongside each other. In the spirit world, there are no sides. It is humans who choose sides.

A truly wonderful book.