Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts ed. by Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts ed. by Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson Alison Turner Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson, eds., Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts. Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2021. Paper, $39.95; e-book, $39.95. In Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts, editors Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson collect essays and other material on three—only three!—Erdrich novels. They frame Erdrich’s justice trilogy, The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016), as “directly connected by the force and the friction of Indigenous people wanting to hold onto their home-lands and preserve their traditions and communities in the face of settler colonialism” (xi). The collection compellingly explores this shared foundation, with eight essays grouped into three (unmarked) umbrellas that the editors describe as “injustices in the trilogy,” “the move from trauma to healing,” and “Ojibwe culture and language as healing ways to restore balance and effect justice” (xviii–xix). Essays focus on trees, dogs, grief, decolonization, language, narrative complexity, genre, and more; some explore one of the three novels, others the trilogy at large; some consider the contexts of Erdrich’s worlds while others look at what the editors call “the texture of Erdrich’s craft” (xvii). The collection is a rain barrel in the storm of Erdrich’s writing: see how small any container will be, see how wild the storm! Committed Erdrich readers might be distracted by how the barrel overflows. What about Tracks (1988), a novel whose central theme [End Page 165] is land dispossession? Or Four Souls (2001), and its protagonist’s persistence for land reclamation? And, for readers who can keep up with Erdrich’s publishing schedule, what about The Sentence (2021), whose formerly incarcerated protagonist deliberately committed one crime at the same time she was framed for another, and whose survival of the carceral system is perhaps Erdrich’s most direct engagement with “justice”? What does it mean to study how justice operates in only one part of a complex whole? But that’s just the fun of being an Erdrich scholar and fan. Another storm is always already on its way, and it will change the look of the land, sometimes for an afternoon, sometimes forever. Perhaps to acknowledge that essays alone cannot satisfy thirsty Erdrich readers, Jacobs and Peterson end the collection with other forms of material. Peter G. Beidler and Gay Barton contribute a new version of their project of charting and indexing Erdrich’s fictional worlds, this time focusing on the trilogy in particular. Readers well acquainted with Erdrich’s ecosystem of characters, histories, and setting—and the delightful possibility that we might at any time encounter someone or something familiar in a new novel—might be frustrated by this pinning down of that which perhaps cannot be, and, for some of us, need not be, cataloged. We are quickly appeased by the reprinted interview with Erdrich that ends the collection. At first a seemingly strange choice to include, since the interview was given to the Paris Review in 2010 and thus precedes the publication of two-thirds of the justice trilogy, the interview ultimately confirms what Erdrich readers already know: the analysis of literature as rich and delightful as Erdrich’s is important, yet any containment of her work can only be temporary. When asked about keeping her characters “straight,” she says: “I used to try to keep them straight in my head, but I didn’t really care if they got messed up. It didn’t mean a lot to me if I got them wrong. . . . I wanted to get on with the story” (270). She shares that she only began adding family trees in the front of her books when fans began presenting her with “painfully drawn out family trees” for her novels (270). Perhaps we do need the work of Beidler and Barton, then, if only to spare our Louise from these offerings. This collection enriches what we know about Erdrich’s writing, worlds, and characters; its frequent allusions to works beyond the [End Page 166] justice trilogy evoke...