THE RED CONVERTIBLE: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008
Louise Erdrich
Harper
Fiction/Short Stories
ISBN: 9780061536076
Louise Erdrich is considered one of America's most prolific and highly respected fiction writers. Her tales of Native American life in modern America and her historical renderings of the rich and complex past of the Ojibwa nation (which is part of her family background) are filled with the kind of details that make you feel as if her life --- and the lives of those she writes about --- intersects yours at some very telling destinations. Family relations, love and marriage, children and domestic life, the past and the present, as well as the hopes of the future, are all points of light within her literary scope.
THE RED CONVERTIBLE is a testament to the far-reaching diversity of her writing; these are stories collected from works, published and unpublished (six of them have never been in print before), for the last 30 years. Erdrich has ordered them chronologically but also by theme and voice. They cover a wealth and breadth of material that shows off all her skills in varying degrees of drama.
There are people in dire straits ("Snares") and young women finding their voice and themselves ("Saint Marie"). What ensues throughout THE RED CONVERTIBLE is this sense that the panoply of experience that defines the characters in Erdrich's world (she is particularly good at redefining the voices of young characters, teens stuck in uncomfortable voids and dramatic situations) would each make particularly moving films. Most of the experiences are fraught with great pain and anger, as people are at odds with one another over some of the most basic concerns of humankind.
Still, with her pointed metaphors and spirited debates on what makes life worth living, Erdrich manages to find unique and specific ways to describe situations that all readers would understand completely and utterly from their own experience. The angst of teenagehood, the bitter pill of aging, the chilling remembrance of a loved one's descent into the last days of life --- even if you haven't gone through these shared human experiences yet, Erdrich's writings feel like she is giving you a heads-up on them so that, when they do happen, you will be able to use her stories as guidelines to move through them more easily.
Erdrich's style creeps up on you. At first it seems unassuming, nothing flowery or futzy about it, but then you realize the power of her perfectly chosen words and it enhances your experience tenfold. It's this remarkable acuity that helps make her storytelling feel like a cozy night in front of a roaring fire with friends instead of a pastiche of leftover stories she decided to pull into a book.
THE RED CONVERTIBLE is well worth the price, and the road it takes you on is well worth the ride.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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