Delphine has come to Argus as a human table in a traveling vaudeville act. She’d like to be the lover of the man who balances on six chairs stacked on her stomach–if he weren’t gay. Though Argus is her hometown, it truly becomes her home only after her wanderings. Having never known her own mother, Delphine gravitates to Eva, the woman with the banner hair, who soon fills the “woman-shaped” hole in Delphine’s life. Eva’s husband, a German butcher and World War I veteran named Fidelis Waldvogel, married her back in the old country, where she was pregnant by a dead comrade-in-arms; he arrived in America with a suitcase full of knives and sausages. All that the stern, manly butcher and the strong, earthy Delphine have in common is their devotion to Eva. And when Eva dies, the two of them must confront each other and the sexual tension between them. Fidelis, Erdrich writes, “had lost his stillness.” Women’s book groups all across the country will soon be losing theirs.
But Erdrich, the novel’s quiet superego, keeps the melodrama firmly in check. When Cyprian, Delphine’s partner in that vaudeville act, proposes marriage, the writing is delightfully dry: “For a long time she didn’t answer. But she wasn’t thinking it over, she was thinking how to tell him no. There was only one way. ‘No’.” And she’s meticulously conscientious about even the most incidental image: “This snow outlined the edges of things and made the town look meaner, bereft, merely tedious, like a mistake set down upon the earth and only half erased.”
Sometimes Erdrich can take the fine writing one sentence too far. “He shed power, as though there was a bigger man crammed into him.” Yes. Just right. “Or could it have been that he was stuffed with the cries of animals?” No. Backspace. Erdrich sometimes seems worried about her tendency to sprawl, tying off loose ends too neatly. As if she realized halfway through that she’d never have time to develop all of Fidelis’s and Eva’s children–they have four boys–Erdrich ships the twins off to Germany to live with their aunt. The larger themes don’t hold up so well either. The master butchers singing club, a group of Argus citizens led by Fidelis’s glorious voice, for example, feels like an afterthought, added to justify the title. And when Fidelis begins dying from a broken heart, the cliche is the real tragedy. But long before we get this far, Erdrich has amassed so much storytelling capital that her gaffes aren’t deal breakers–she already has you where she wants you, carried away with a love story you might have thought you were too cynical to enjoy.
