In John Irving’s latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, one of the characters, a writer, complains about book reviewers:
In the media, real life was more important than fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public than those pieces of the novel-writing process that were “merely” made up.
One can imagine Louise Erdrich, making the rounds to promote her new novel Shadow Tag, making the same complaint and saying, as Irving’s character Danny “subversively” said,
…a fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story … because real- life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.
So let’s get one thing out of the way to begin with. Louise Erdrich used to be married to Michael Dorris, their careers were intertwined, their marriage ended in divorce with allegations of child abuse and Dorris committed suicide.
Now let’s move on to Erdrich’s fiction.