Word: erdrich
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...will not surprise Louise Erdrich's constant readers that a number of people from her previous fiction reappear in her enchanting and absorbing new novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (HarperCollins; 361 pages; $26). "A few years ago, I finally decided that I was working on one long novel," Erdrich says, sitting in a comfortable chair in Birchbark Books, the store she opened last June in a residential neighborhood in Minneapolis. Strapped to her chest in a Baby Bjorn carrier is Azure, the infant daughter whom the author, 46, bore in early January...
...just because Nanapush, the raffishly funny Ojibwe storyteller, and various members of the Kashpaw clan--major players in other Erdrich books--show up again in The Last Report doesn't mean that the new novel stints on surprises. The biggest one is revealed early. Erdrich's fans have met Father Damien Modeste and Agnes DeWitt before. Now these two merge into one person...
Their troubles with their children no doubt added to the marital burden. Abel died in a car accident in 1991, and their other two adopted children, Jeffrey, now around 25, and Madeline, 21, also struggled with fetal-alcohol problems and eventually became estranged from Dorris and Erdrich. "I don't think I was by any means the best parent my children could have found," Dorris acknowledged last month during a reading in Washington...
...Erdrich and Dorris pressed attempted-theft charges against Jeffrey, who had been working at odd jobs around the country, and was living in Denver. The charges stemmed from a rambling, five-page letter he wrote from the Denver County Jail, where he was awaiting prosecution on misdemeanor charges of beating his girlfriend. He wrote, "Think about what we put up with as helpless children. You beat us senseless, you terrorized us, you made us walk on eggshells, we feared you, and then Louise comes onto the picture. Instead of stopping his abuse, she kicks in." He blamed his own troubles...
...that Dorris abused his children. She portrays the charges as an attempt by Dorris "to shut [Jeffrey] up." But according to people close to the couple, Jeffrey so frightened them that they essentially went into hiding, first in Montana, then in Minneapolis, where they moved in 1993 and where Erdrich and Dorris, on leave from Dartmouth, continued their writing. Their location, says a friend, was "a secret that had to be kept because they really believed someone in their lives would find them and hurt them...