New chapter forembattled writer

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The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

By Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins

361 pages (hc)

$39.50

The author photo on Chippewa writer Louise Erdrich's last two books shows her as haggard, drawn, shadowed. No wonder. In the mid-1990s, she was embroiled in a messy divorce from her longtime collaborator and husband, the writer and academic Michael Dorris, who committed suicide in 1997 after being investigated for the sexual abuse of at least one of the couple's five children.

The story was splashed across the front pages, and Erdrich retreated, giving few interviews and remaining silent about the details. (The police files on the abuse charges were sealed after Dorris' death.)

Erdrich, who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, now has a new lover (whom she declines to name) and a new baby (at age 46). She has also opened The Birchbark, a bookstore in an upscale Minneapolis neighborhood. Although two of her adopted children had been estranged, the family is now reunited. Not surprisingly, the author photo on her new book shows a face that is open, content, happy: it's like she's been born again, and released from a negative energy.

Reawakening and rebirth are also the focus of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Erdrich's seventh novel in a related series.

In this book, which spans decades in the lives of its characters, the main character undergoes no less than three major changes in identity: from Sister Cecillia, the Catholic nun, to Agnes DeWitt, the German farmwife, to Father Damien Modeste of the reservation parish. Agnes assumes her last identity during a flood that destroys the North Dakota landscape and drowns the original priest, who was on his way to the reservation and his new assignment. The book is structured around Father Damien's reflections of life on the reservation-his personal history and the histories of the families who live there.

Throughout the book, Erdrich uses events of biblical proportions (the flood, various risings of the dead or almost-dead, a deluge of snakes) to illustrate profound shifts in roles and relationships-how people resist that change, and how they embrace it. The character of Agnes/Father Damien embodies the way most people balance the contradictory aspects of their personalities, and how they choose, most often, to show only one side. Yet when Father Damien's belief system also changes as a result of his lifetime on the reservation, emerging finally as a blend of Catholic dogma and Ojibwe spirituality, Erdrich is clearly pointing to the fact that people can blend seemingly disparate elements into a coherent whole.

Ideas about identity carry over into Erdrich's characterization of Sister Leopolda, an evil nun who has been a major character in the other related books. In scenes that take place in the present day, a young priest named Father Jude is sent to the reservation to speak with Father Damien about Leopolda, who is a candidate for sainthood. Father Damien's testimony makes it clear that the divine acts associated with the nun were almost always shadowed by malevolence. Erdrich seems to be making the same point she made in the few interviews she gave after Dorris' suicide: that how the public sees people is different than what those close to them see.

The Last Report has so far received rave reviews. But the book is little more than a series of vignettes; set pieces that read like character sketches or brief scenes for a play. It's as if Erdrich has written this book with a common thread but no needle with which to sew. The scenes are far too short, and the stories never woven together. The constant back-and-forth is more than episodic: it's disjointed, and it doesn't allow readers to immerse themselves in a tale. It creates a disconnection between reader and book, as if Erdrich is holding the reader at arm's length.

But the reality is, second-rate Erdrich is still better than most. The Last Report is still a good read, for a variety of reasos: for the author's portrayal of the tests we face and how we survive them, for her idea that forgiveness conveys absolution, for her ability to describe how Christianity has affected Ojibwe spirituality, and for her assertion that there can be a successful blending of the two. Most importantly, though, The Last Report is important and rewarding because of Erdrich's understanding of the power of love, the beauty of desire, and the ugliness we put ourselves through when we deny ourselves those things.

The vignettes in this book fill in and tie up details the author has only hinted at in her other books. Read alongside those other books, it overcomes its drawbacks and becomes a necessary and revealing work that adds nuance to stories about the battles we all create between heart and mind, body and soul, character and identity.