Echo of her own crumbling marriage

By Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins. 272 pp. $25.99 nolead ends

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Reviewed by Susan Balée

Shadow Tag

is difficult to read and hard to put down.

I've never enjoyed novels about dissolving marriages, with children caught in the crossfire of fighting parents, but this one is particularly difficult as it's by Louise Erdrich.

Erdrich's marriage to Michael Dorris ended with his suicide in 1997, followed by terrible allegations by their children, adopted and natural, of his abuse and her quiescence. Their iconic union had come to a very tragic and very public end, and Erdrich had to face the consequences, which she did stoically.

Shadow Tag is a brave book for Erdrich to have penned. The novel tells the story of Gil and Irene. Gil is an American Indian painter and he's become famous for his paintings of his wife, Irene America.

"She had allowed him to paint her on all fours, looking beaten once, another time snarling like a dog and bleeding. . . . In other paintings she was a goddess, breasts tipped with golden fire."

Gil is obsessed with his wife; she is both his subject and his object, but now he senses her slipping away from him. He knows she doesn't love him anymore, and he's enraged.

For Irene's part, she longs to escape. Gil's love exhausts her and his rage terrifies her and their children. When she discovers he's been reading her diary, she decides to use it to manipulate him and begins a separate diary for herself.

In the diary for Gil, she details sexual escapades with other men she never had because she knows that will torture him. In her own diary, she remembers when she first knew she no longer loved Gil and thought "I am gone. . . . It is not really a moment one can act upon where there are children involved, however. One must keep trying."

As in so many marriages, Irene stays with her husband for the sake of their children. To get through her days, she drinks. She also works, desultorily, on a dissertation about the 19th-century painter George Catlin. This is a useful device for Erdrich, as Catlin, like Gil, possessed his subjects. The Indians he painted felt that he had stolen their shadows - their souls - with his paintings. In his writings, Catlin claimed to love the tribes he spent a great deal of his life with; no doubt he did, but he also exploited them. History depends on the perspective of the historian, and accounts of tragedies depend on the survivors.

In Shadow Tag, though both Gil and Irene have broken rules in their marriage, it's clearly Gil who has terrorized and alienated his family. "Gil loved his family with a despairing sort of devotion, for he knew that on a fundamental level they shrank away from him." Like Michael Dorris, widely reported to be the first unmarried man ever to adopt children in the United States, Gil wants a perfect family: a wife and children who love him and make him look good to others.

When the children mess up in school or don't treat him deferentially, he hits them. The oldest, his son Florian, hates him with an icy malice. His next, daughter Riel, flinches when he's near her. The baby, Stoney, simply clutches his stuffed animals, afraid. Riel, who becomes an important narrator in Shadow Tag, says the thing Erdrich must hope her own children believe about her: "Although their mother cannot tell them, she was always, secretly, on their side."

Erdrich portrays Gil as both self-pitying and shamelessly controlling, but she doesn't let Irene off the hook, either. Irene, as Erdrich did once, takes a photograph of a bruise her husband gave her child. But in Shadow Tag, the child knows how little and how late this gesture is. Florian unleashes the full force of his scorn for the mother who didn't protect her children by leaving an abusive husband: "You're weak. You're a weakly interacting mom person. A WIMP. Florian gave Irene a false smile. Don't cry. He changed his voice to an insinuating whine. You'll be okay. We'll just put a little ice on that bruise. I mean, ice in that drink."

Shadow Tag builds to a spectacular ending with a twist I didn't see coming. The story is painful, but it's beautifully written and I love the animals that flow through the narrative, especially the family's dogs, sensors of every human emotion, who try to deflect the bad ones from the people they love. They are like the novel's Greek chorus, recognizing what is happening but unable to change its inevitable outcome.

At one point in the novel, an omniscient narrator observes, "the union of the tragic and the sentimental is kitsch." Thankfully, this novel is anything but. Louise Erdrich has taken a tragedy and turned it into art.