THE SILENT CENTER

LOUISE ERDRICH'S TALE OF FATE AND FAMILY MERGES THE EVERYDAY AND THE MYTHICAL

Author: By Abby Frucht

Date: SUNDAY, March 29, 1998

Page: G1

Section: Books

If the ``driveways and houses, concrete parking garages and business stores'' of urban Minneapolis are still called by that city's earlier, trading-village name, Gakahbekong, that's because they ``could all blow off. And yet the sheer land would be left underneath. Sand, rock, the Indian black seashell-bearing earth.'' If the woman kidnapped by trader-turned-wino Klaus Shawano, and made his wife, does nothing all day but crack her broken-toothed smile, unmindful of her daughters abandoned years ago in their sleeping bags, that's because as a baby she was suckled by a man, then raised by a herd of antelope. Now she is contented with a square of sidewalk outside Frank Shawano's bakery, stuffing into her mouth the blitzkuchen her brother-in-law tries to duplicate from a lost, story-laden recipe. If Cally, the practical, thoughtful young woman who occasionally narrates the adventures binding her family, suddenly hears the word ``Daashkikaa'' while carrying her twin grandmothers' casserole of food from the car to the house on Christmas Day, that might be because she's ``the namer,'' meant to take ``power from the in-between.''

Even more than Erdrich's others, this novel, composed of multiple stories, demonstrates the author's intimate familiarity with life's kaleidoscope of doomed loves, suicides, misunderstandings, deceptions, mistaken identities, subterfuge and, always, the clash between will and fate, between fleeting mortal life and the timeless spiral of all humanity. Like the glass or plastic beads whose glinting interiors wed their immortal significance to the moccasins, belts, and jackets they adorn, the events in this novel fuse every present story to the stories that preceded it. ``From way back our destinies form,'' says Cally. ``Family stories repeat themselves in patterns and waves generation to generation, across bloods and time.'' Even so, Cally muses, ``into all our lives there comes a great uncertainty to foil us.''

From the novel's opening pages, when as a baby she was carried off into the wilderness by a frightened sled dog, to the closing pages, when as an adult she is led back to the village that claims her, Klaus's wife is meant to be the fulcrum upon which the hundreds of intervening stories of this novel are caught off balance, its characters drawn and repelled by her broken tooth, her supposed power. It was Klaus who named her The Antelope Wife, bewitched by the ``wicked hoof'' of her hand in his, by her grass-scented breath, her speechlessness, her unfamiliarity with modern contrivances. Also called Sweetheart Calico for the ribbon of cloth that bound her to her trader husband's hands, the Antelope Wife is said to alter ``the shape of things around her and . . . of things to come. She upsets me,'' says her neice Cally, ``then enlightens me with her truthless stare.''

Indeed many lives are derailed in this novel, thrown off course by passion or tragedy, but Erdrich's casting of the Antelope Wife as the ``uncertainty'' that haunts them is finally a blurred contrivance. The novel's overarching device finally fails to embody, or to unify, the pieces of its overarching theme. The book would have been stronger left in the hands of Cally, whose thoughtful observations do more justice to her author's remarkable sympathy, keen eye, and skilled storytelling than can Sweetheart Calico's inscrutable gaze. On Christmas Day, when Cally asks Sweetheart Calico, is love ``an old or a new thing? Is every love an ancient love?'' she knows the woman won't answer, and the trouble with the novel is that while Erdrich wants us to believe that Sweetheart Calico is mystery itself, is all the world's ``uncertainty'' personified, she's not. She's just a frowzy, mum guest in a kitchen overcrowded with the family stories. Meant to be the enigma that holds the stories together, she is instead a distraction to the reader, her own story too precious, her significance overblown, her function in the novel confused and unfulfilled.

The preciousness of much of Sweetheart Calico's character -- her name included -- should be no surprise to seasoned readers of Erdrich, who often embeds her real wisdom in story-telling gimmickry. The cake that Frank attempts to duplicate tastes right only when the people who eat it are afraid; the Hawaiian vacation that Richard Whiteheart Beads gives Klaus turns out to be a ploy to get Klaus arrested for Richard's wrongdoings; Cally's twin grandmothers won't divulge which of them was the biological mother; and an unwelcome wedding guest who claims to have poisoned the cake is finally subdued by a bop on the head with a frozen turkey. Despite their cuteness, such moments have their charms, and their value; Erdrich leads every event in her book to its outer limits, so no detail is mundane, and each scene contains its measure of hilarity, extravagance, or horror. When Rozina Whiteheart Beads leaves Richard for Frank Shawano, the initial result is one of the most tragic scenes ever to come along in anyone's fiction, but the final moment in their story is one of the funniest.

Throughout, the author's ample affection for human nature finds expression in playful inventiveness. Again at Christmas, Cally describes Frank's handmade dining table as ``wheat-grained and butter smooth . . . planed and joined like a long prayer.'' This novel is a kind of long prayer, too -- flawed yet impassioned, its hopeful plea half smothered by its exuberance. Erdrich's many readers will bend their ears to it, and like any worthy recipients of prayer will be as moved as they are bewildered.