I was taken with her, completely, and blinded by happiness at the unlikely thought of her having my name. I pored over the set of her wide mouth, the pointed and minuscule chin. She’d retreated into a deep hypnotic sleep, but her tiny calm face seemed full of stubborn purpose. “Later that evening, when I’d finally put a call through and we were waiting for the emergency jeep that would not arrive until morning, Celestine held the baby toward me. These voices include three women whose lives are wholly interconnected, an absent rogue (brother to one, cousin to another, lover to the third), an earnest, decent man who sticks around, a young daughter born halfway through the novel, and a third-person narrator who brings a sense of objectivity and distance to its sections.

In The Beet Queen, we have seven different narrators spanning 40 or years of time. It’s not a feel-good kind of family really, because like a blood family, many of the members don’t even really like each other. Because each of these people comes from their own form of unstable family, they wind up creating their own. This novel tells of one such family, created in part by blood, in part by a closeness/obsession, and in part by a sense of stability created outside of a marriage framework. Families are often made up of blood relatives, non-blood associations, adoptees, ghosts/spectres, and people who came around one day and never left, as well as absentee relations. One of the Erdrich’s common ideas is an understanding of blended families. There’s real genius without dipping too much into cleverness. It almost never feels like there’s an extra word on the page. But there is also an economy to her style. When I say form instead of flourish, I mean that there is depth and richness to her writing, complexity does come at times in complicated sentence structures, and she’s putting careful touches on each clause. It focuses more so on form and effect than on flourish, so it would be right, then, to link her in some ways to Faulkner and Morrison. Erdrich’s writing is direct, competent, and complex. For whatever reason, for this time in my life, I have clicked with her writing. In this previous year, I have read seven of her novels and look to read the remaining seven this year. I went from being suspect of her to reading as much of her stuff as I could stomach to sitting up the morning of the Nobel announcement having convinced myself she was about to win. 2016 could have easily been my year of Louise Erdrich.

The beet queen by louise erdrich