The Red Convertible: Selected and new stories

by: Louise Erdrich

Published by: HarperCollins Publishers

Reviewed by Gene Hayworth

In an early poem titled “Jacklight,” Louise Erdrich wrote, “And now they take the first steps, now knowing / how deep the woods are and lightless.” These penetrating lines of poetry also illuminate much of Erdrich’s fiction. It is the resistance that occurs between not knowing and now knowing that gives the stories in her new collection, The Red convertible: selected and new stories, a raw yet compassionate power.

Erdrich’s characters find themselves confronted by those rare, crystallized moments when destiny and chance collide; when one can either chose to act or yield to fate. One exceptional example is the moment in “The Plunge of the Brave,” when the narrator, Nector Kashpaw, realizes that he has been sitting, without action, at the center of his life. “What I saw was time passing,” Nector muses, “each minute collecting behind me before I had squeezed from it any life.” That realization convinces Nector to act on a passion that will have drastic consequences.

Part of the magic in these stories is the skill with which Erdrich transforms her characters, leaving it to the reader to work out the veiled relationships between them as they appear and reappear in different guises. Moving from one story to the next is like traversing a mobius strip: the narratives fold back on themselves in subtle, surprising ways. Just when the reader is left to ponder the fate of the abandoned girl Mary in “The Blue Velvet Box,” she returns in the form of a middle-aged woman in “Pounding the Dog.” Nector Kashpaw, in “The Plunge of the Brave,” may be a younger version of Grandpa Kashpaw in the story “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” but there are just enough discrepancies to make the reader skeptical and unsure.

Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Objibwe, has mastered the natural beauty of Native American storytelling and combined it with elements of stark realism in the style of writers like Raymond Carver and Frederick Barthelme. The tales in The Red Convertible are infused with moments of magic and mystery. Some of those moments may seem fantastic, but the characters are fully realized people that you will recognize and remember long after you have finished the book.

Armchair Interviews says: A powerful 5-star read.