The Painted Drum
by Louise Erdrich
CRITIC'S CHOICE
[3.5]
Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and Tracks, returns to her roots in North Dakota's Ojibwe nation in this luminous tale of lives broken and redeemed. Her 11th novel is a series of interconnected, multigenerational stories centered around a sacred Native American drum that brings life, death or healing to families whose history is touched by the instrument.
The journey begins with Faye Travers and her mother, who is part Native American; the two live in New Hampshire, where they make a living by settling estates. When Faye discovers the eponymous drum while appraising the estate of a former Indian agent, she recognizes the object as sacred and returns it to the North Dakota reservation that was home to her mother's family.
Erdrich's prose here is as lyrical as any of the works from her poetry collections: Ghosts who visit a grieving father become "tiny skeleton children who flitted and zipped across his ceiling like spidery bats." Deftly, the author uses the voices of those who have touched the drum to trace its journey from North Dakota to New Hampshire and then back again. Faye's journey bookends the drum's tale as she comes to terms with the accidental death of her younger sister when the two were just children. In the end all of those affected by the instrument—which is called into being by the ghost of a daughter—mourn the loss of a child. It is the memory of those children that provides forgiveness and healing.
NONFICTION
Ditched by Dr. Right
by Elizabeth Warner
When the man known as Dr. Right walked out of Elizabeth Warner's life, he gave up more than a desirable apartment in "an antiseptic but deceptively cheery part of midtown Manhattan." He also relinquished access to her sweet world view and sharp wit. Warner's essays, collected here, are best when they center on the trials of dating in a city filled with Lotharios who filch from hosts at private parties; pieces that aim to explore the meaning of life tend to overreach. But readers will be wooed by her hilarious perspective: Who else would describe a vacation group leader as "a leering pansexual ocelot of a Scotsman" or a neighbor as "an adulterous pickax of a socialite"?
- Contributors:
- Lisa Kay Greissinger,
- Eleni Gage.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
