In class, we just finished reading a book called The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, and I did not like it. If I am to be completely honest, I enjoyed the Team Fortress 2 (a supremely plotless, gory video game) fanfiction I read this week more than I did this accoladed work of American Literature (with the capitals, the capitals are necessary). Accordingly, I am somewhat concerned about my taste. Or lack thereof.
I write with the intention of entertaining. This means that I read a lot of speculative fiction, with explosions and monsters and dastardly villains and hopefully a good snog somewhere in there, because biology is important. But I do make an effort to read literature. I love Les Miserables and Shakespeare, because they're compelling works. They have lots of plot and characters I can fall in love with. So I am prejudiced and perhaps not the best person to write a review of this. But it brought home quite firmly that, given a choice between this sort of literary writing and mean, moneygrubbing entertainment writing, I am better suited to the latter.
Plague of Doves is a series of short pieces (a glance in the back of the book will show them to have been published separately. In my opinion, they should have stayed that way--like doves, they are tolerable on their own or in pairs, but together they are tiresome), united by setting. Our stage is the fictional town of Pluto, North Dakota, and the adjoining reservation. The time is somewhere in the 1960s or 70s, and in 1911, a group of Ojibwe were lynched for the murder of a family (of which, of course, they are innocent). The collection of vignettes deals with the effects of this on the descendants of the victims and the perpetrators.
The problem is it doesn't. We get scraps from lives: some have little to do with the original event, and are little affected. There are other events to keep us interested in the meantime; a kidnapping, a cult, a murder, the theft of a violin. Some of these simply establish characters who step in and have an incidentally huge effect on the plot that we never even see onscreen. Even during the famous sewer tangent in Les Miserables, the plot goes on. One puts up with Hugo's exhaustive descriptions of the sewers of Paris because 1) it is fun to listen to Hugo being catty about Napoleon III and 2) Jean Valjean is in those sewers and you want to see him get out in one piece. In Plague of Doves, we are given new plots with very little to do with the others, and they only connect by the barest thread of coincidence. I found this frustrating.
The other thing is the role of coincidence. The characters all seem to be mind readers. They know what another is thinking just by looking at him or her, and then respond appropriately. Never do we have someone ask someone else who is staring profoundly into space if dinner disagreed with them; we receive plot-relevant statements, great revelations. Stylistically necessary, yes, but not very realistic.
We also have the role of strange reactions and overreactions. Our main character in one arc (Evelina) realizes she's a lesbian, and soon after her lover leaves. Evelina accordingly sinks into a depression and is admitted to the same mental institution as she was working in. It seemed far too much of a reaction to swallow easily, even with her history of falling tragically in love. A young (and I thought initially) incredibly moral judge recounts how he stepped over his lover's gravely bee-stung husband and nibbles at the honey of the broken hive, only being stung twice. I should think a sensible person would get the living hell away from a bee swarm, and that any sensible bee would react with extreme prejudice to something munching at its broken hive. Perhaps I mistake strange reactions for magical realism, of which there is a great deal in the book.
Then there is the sex. Sex is great. Sex is an attention grabber. Here, it is used to advance the plot and establish character development, and is described in such ways that make it seem as compelling as taking a dump. I found myself skipping those bits, because there was a certain limit to my tolerance in listening to the male characters worry that the bed would fall down, as they 'make their way toward bliss'.
The next problem is voice. I cannot stand the voice. It is passive. No, the bits of it that ought to be passive are active, and those that should be active, passive. We do not get to be in the room when the persecuted Marn murders her despicable husband with a syringe of snake venom while having sex. She tells us about it. But we hear every blow of a conversation about stamps between two old ladies.
When the voice discribes, it does it with a real will to poetry. Indeed, nothing but a metaphor will do if it may possibly fit. It is lyrical, sure, but I am somewhat allergic to figurative language, especially if it's in the middle of a important turning in the character's life or in the plot.
In the end, I am left befuddled. I cannot see how people enjoy this, and yet they do. It's prettily written--but there's too much of the prettiness and it seems put on after a while. It's profound, but the profundity seems to focus on how shitty people are, which I already knew and don't like being reminded of. It's a huge tapestry of lives...but I can bring myself to care about none of the characters and there's too little plot to compensate for that. Reading this book, I experienced much the same thing that I do when staring at a stripy canvas in an art museum--confusion and a general feeling that I'm doomed to wander through life a positive barbarian, unable to enjoy anything but the most obvious beauty that walks up and smacks me upside the helmeted head. In short, I don't get it. I suppose it's good in its genre, as it exemplifies every reason I avoid said genre.
Perhaps it's an acquired taste. Like mushrooms or tomatoes.
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