Louise? She's all right. Don't underestimate Erdrich's fiction.

I can still remember the excitement of reading Louise Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine - such a fresh new voice, at once innovative and accessible, and a report from the field - a community not often written about - the Native Americans of the Midwest, told sometimes from a very traditional, internal perspective and also, at times, from the point of view of a young member of the tribe who has moved away, grown, gone to school, and maybe come back or maybe not. I read all of Erdrich's books for some time, but have to admit that I have not read all of her work in more recent years - it's almost as if her success was her undoing, many had followed her and her voice was no long unique, I began to associate her with best-selling, book-group fiction, and though always enjoyed reading pieces I came across did not rush out to grab her next new novel. I've come to think I've been underestimating her recent work, based in part on her story, Nero, in the current New Yorker. She's always been a great storyteller, very drawn to traditional plots and to the dictum of show don't tell - lots of action and emotion in her stories, and not a lot of needless rumination. Again - easy to underestimate that talent, and write her off as just a raconteur. Nero, as just one example, shows there's a lot more going on in Erdrich's fiction than just good yarns from the rez - this story is extremely well crafted, and traces a period in the life of a young girl, very much from her point of view, though recollected from years later, and story working on 2 levels: the eponymous Nero is a ferocious guard dog in the girl's grandfather's butcher shop, and as the girl tentatively cares for and befriends the dog, the dog leads her to the discovery that her uncle is courting a neighboring woman - a dnagerous courtship because of the extraordinary fierce jealousy of the girl's dad - story leading to a ritualized fight between young man and potential father-in-law. The girl has little overt reaction to this fight - but we can see a little bit around the edges and see that she's learning, in silence, about the strange ways of adults - the jealousy, the sexual drives, the domination. The dog becomes a symbol of this, and, at the end of the story, when the dog dies and the girl and her uncle bury the corpse, we can see or sense that an episode in her life has passed - that she has learned about the frightfulness of adulthood. Erdrich's stories seem to be conventional and circumscribed - but at their best they're as grand and universal as I.B. Singer or other great writers who have concentrated on a little postage stamp of native soil, to quote one of 'em.