The Painted Drum
By Louise Erdrich

Reviewed by Reviewed by Emberly Nesbitt

The Painted Drum is the kind of book that resists explanation. Or requires explanation with caveats. Its about this magical Native American drum, see, but really its about sacrifice, about grief, about surviving well-intentioned, but destructive love. The great psychic wound of the American Indians, stripped of their land and forced to assimilate into a culture largely dismissive of their beliefs, has been at the implied center of most of Louise Erdrichs writing since her brilliant debut novel, Love Medicine. In her eleventh novel, The Painted Drum, what she manages is what she always manages, which is to offer her readers a direct window into the culture without all that we think we know about it, or about life, love, and loss getting in the way.

The novel begins and ends with the story of Faye Travers, one quarter Ojibwe, a woman in her fifties who lives an intentionally sheltered life alongside her mother. The two women run an estate appraisal business. Faye steals a ceremonial drum from one of the estates. Faye, a woman stretched over a rigid frame herself, with just enough Ojibwe in her to hear the call of the drum, lifts the instrument purely by instinct. She is invested, to a point, in an affair with a local sculptor who loses his daughter violently in the beginning of the book. Since no event in the novel is singular, the loss of one daughter leads both backwards (to a daughters death that occasioned the making of the drum), and forward (to the near loss of other native daughters). Fayes lovers grief forces her to engage with a sorrow from her own past, and as we move forward in the book the grief of one heart continually implicates the understanding of others.

The texture, gesture, and innateness of lyrical writing are the blood and bone of The Painted Drum. Erdrichs metaphors interpret memory through storytelling and therefore inhabit language at its most concrete. She has respect for the way things are. When Faye Travers remarks Whenever you leave cleared land, or a path, or a road, when you step from someplace carved out, plowed, or traced by a human and pass into the woods, you must leave something of yourself behind. It is that sudden loss, I think, even more than the difficulty of walking through undergrowth that keeps people firmly fixed to paths, Erdrich tricks us into simple wisdom. Loss is always sudden. Loss means that life must die to create more life. Suffering keeps people firmly fixed to paths.

The middle section of the book switches narration to Bernard Shaawano to describe the origins of the painted drum, which Faye and her mother have brought back to the North Dakota reservation where it was made. Bernard Shaawanos memories of his father and grandfather assembling the drum on the reservation lead to the telling of other distant stories of families whose lives were touched by the drum tales of women burning with love, a girl eaten by wolves, young children left alone without food in a house on a cold night. Some of the characters in these stories identify themselves as modern men and women, but all of them seek to reconcile with current conditions by finding the well-worn path from the past, seeking meaning and comfort in traditional stories. Shaawanos voice becomes the disembodied voice of legend, but his far-ranging account eventually leads back to the personal, to the drums final service. Each of his incantatory stories is strong enough to stand alone. Each delivers powerful images, ed ge of the seat suspense, and psychologically astute observations, while also offering up the outsized qualities of a dream.

In Louise Erdrichs work, eloquence rises up to take on suffering. Her illustrations of what saves us, or what moves us past an irredeemable loss remain faithful to the cycles of the natural world, the decay and regeneration of matter, the use of trees and skin to make instruments, or the birth and death of daughters. In The Painted Drum she quietly and beautifully articulates both the pain of modern life and its simple truth: what keeps us alive was once alive itself.

Other Louise Erdrich recommendations: Love Medicine, The Master Butchers Singing Club