"Shadow Tag" the latest novel by award-winning Native American author Louise Erdrich '76 traces the story of a crumbling relationship behind a picture-perfect facade. In typical Erdrich fashion, the prose is beautifully tragic, depicting the demise of a marriage and family with a masterful combination of stark realism and grace. The result of such contradictory forces of beautiful language depicting the supremely ugly, from marital enmity to depression to child abuse is a mounting tension that pervades the entire work.
Thus, "Shadow Tag" lends itself to a restless reading. You know something is coming, but cannot guess what. And when the novel comes full circle in its final pages, culminating in a monumental and tragic blow, you still find yourself unprepared.
This is a clever choice on Erdrich's part. Shock breeds introspection, creating a novel that stays with readers well after they finish reading.
The novel's lasting impact is rooted in the facade of domestic tranquility that Erdrich crafts around the troubled relationship of Gil and Irene America. Gil has crafted his reputation as an artist through an ongoing series of controversial paintings of Irene. To outsiders largely defined as non-Natives such a dynamic appears romantic, and when the Americas attend a museum art opening Irene is showered with gushing praise.
But despite its acclaim, their marriage is far from ideal. While the relationship began with passion, Gil's portraits render their subject increasingly numb, dead in life. The artist himself grows paranoid and obsessed, perhaps insane, and begins to depict Irene cruelly in painting after painting, she is poked and prodded, cast as a symbol of the oppressed rather than as a thinking, feeling human being: "he'd been working on a mythic level with the portraits her portrayals immediately evoked problems of exploitation, the indigenous body, the devouring momentum of history."
Over time, these degrading portraits take a toll on Irene, who begins to lose her sense of self. Real life turns hazy, all clarity obscured by a drunken stupor. In a tragically raw moment, Erdrich shows us the extent of Irene's steady decline: upon inspecting pictures that her six-year-old son Stoney has drawn of her, Irene notices that "a stick with a little half moon on the end of it" her wine glass appears in each drawing, like an "appendage." "He thinks it's a part of you," older son Florian informs his mother.
Cognizant of this downward spiral, Irene struggles to recapture her essential humanity, as well as the vivacity of her former life. Irene's journey to recapture her self manifests itself in the structural premise of Erdrich's work. While the majority of the novel plays out in the third person, shifting focus from one character to another, the narration is interspersed with excerpts from Irene's two diaries: a blue one, which she keeps to herself, and a red one, which she discovered Gil reading and now writes specifically for his shifty, deceitful eyes. With this red diary, Irene purposefully manipulates, even tortures, her husband, inserting vague allusions to fictional dalliances with other men that build in graphic detail over the course of the novel, paralleling the work's mounting tension and tragedy.
Although this discord is subtle as "Shadow Tag" opens, it rapidly intensifies over the course of the novel. By the time tragedy strikes, the world of the Americas has spun completely out of control. They are a family lost, damaged beyond repair. And this gloom makes for heavy reading. "Shadow Tag" is by no means a feel-good novel. I won't lie I was pretty depressed as I finished the book. Paradoxically, however, I was also inspired. With her masterful control of language and keen insights into the tragedy of human existence, Erdrich possesses the rare ability to make her readers think and feel.
