Shadow Tag
Let鈥檚 say you discover your husband has been reading your diary. Do you (a) bop him over the head with it and tell him not be such an idiot, (b) leave, as the violation of trust is really creepy, (c) seek counseling, as there鈥檚 clearly a problem here, or (d) don鈥檛 tell him you found out, and instead start keeping a secret diary in a bank deposit box while writing adulterous scenes in the old one to torture him.
Irene America goes with 鈥渄鈥� in Louise Erdrich鈥檚 almost unbearably powerful new novel, Shadow Tag. Since her husband, Gil, a renowned painter, suspects her anyway, Irene figures that she might as well give him what he鈥檚 looking for. Even before she realized Gil was reading her diary, Irene felt as if she had no privacy: For years, she鈥檚 been her husband鈥檚 model, spending hours literally naked as he painted.
鈥淗e鈥檇 done a series of landscapes, huge canvases vast with light, swimming Albert Bierstadt or Hudson School replicas, in which she鈥檇 appeared raped, dismembered, dying of smallpox in graphic medical detail.鈥� And at some point, she discovers, he somehow stole her identity. 鈥淏y remaining still, in one position or another, for her husband, she had released a double into the world. It was impossible, now, to withdraw that reflection. Gil owned it. He had stepped on her shadow.鈥�
Irene鈥檚 only refuge is the bath, with its blessed locked door. (Even there, Gil wants to know how long she鈥檒l be.) And at this point, she needs more than Calgon to take her away.
In 鈥淪hadow Tag,鈥� Erdrich, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, strips away anything tangential. There are no exuberant bursts of magic realism, no naked women playing Chopin while being carried downriver in a flood. 鈥淪hadow Tag鈥� is instead a tightly written close-up of the final months of a destructive marriage, written with great reserves of power and wisdom. Erdrich has always been a master of metaphor; here she uses the native American belief of shadows as souls to powerful effect.
The novel is told by excerpts from the two diaries 鈥� the real and fake 鈥� with details filled in by an omniscient narrator, whose identity isn鈥檛 revealed until the last chapter. Trying to live while always being watched has stunted Irene, as has her role as the 鈥減anther-like鈥� half of an 鈥渋mportant native American couple.鈥� (She鈥檚 never finished her dissertation on 19th-century painter George Catlin, whose paintings of native Americans sometimes startled the subjects.)
For his part, Gil craves Irene鈥檚 love and cannot live without trying to repossess it. And he has his own label to deal with, having been pigeonholed as a 鈥渘ative American painter.鈥� 鈥淒on鈥檛 paint Indians. The subject wins. A Native painter himself had said this. You鈥檒l never be an artist. You鈥檒l be an American Indian artist.鈥� And so, Gil, because he paints his wife, is a 鈥減ainter of the American West, even though he lived in Minneapolis.鈥�
As 鈥淪hadow Tag鈥� progresses, Irene struggles against inertia and alcoholism to free herself from her 鈥渋conic marriage,鈥� while controlling Gil fights to breathe life back into it鈥� no matter whom he hurts in the process. Huddled at ground zero between the two trenches are their three children.
Despite the shouting and bruises, they both somehow believe they鈥檝e protected the children from any permanent damage. Meanwhile, 6-year-old Stoney draws portraits of his mother with a wineglass as an extension of her hand and carries a stuffed lion for protection. (After an especially bad fight, he shows up at his older brother鈥檚 door with the lion, 鈥減lus a bear, a moose, and an orange chicken.鈥�) Riel, their 10-year-old daughter, looks for survival pointers from her mother鈥檚 biographies of 19th-century native Americans and keeps granola bars and water bottles ready in an old Barbie workout bag, in case of terrorist attack. Florian, a teenage math genius, lets his younger siblings sleep in his room and sneaks bottles of his mother鈥檚 wine.
If the kids aren鈥檛 affecting enough for you, then there are the family pets. Even the dogs are always on guard. 鈥淚rene thought they had gravitas. Weighty demeanors. She thought of them as diplomats. She had noticed that when Gil was about to lose his temper one of the dogs always appeared and did something to divert his attention.鈥�
Erdrich鈥檚 characterizations in 鈥淪hadow Tag鈥� are marvels of both economy and compassion. She doesn鈥檛 turn possessive Gil or passive Irene into bad guys, instead laying out what makes them fully human without flinching from the damage they do. It may be tempting to read parallels into Erdrich鈥檚 own 鈥渋conic marriage,鈥� to poet and writer Michael Dorris, who committed suicide in 1997. But 鈥淪hadow Tag鈥� doesn鈥檛 feel like a roman 脿 clef, and it would be doing a disservice to limit what Erdrich has accomplished here by labeling it as such.
鈥淪hadow Tag鈥� resonates with an almost unbelievable power. Where some tragedies are coldly bleak, as if the novelist couldn鈥檛 put his characters through so much if he let himself care about them, 鈥淪hadow Tag鈥� is just the opposite. It wouldn鈥檛 be able to break a reader鈥檚 heart so thoroughly if Erdrich hadn鈥檛 invested it with so much of her own.
Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.
