Week 6: Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling (BlueHen, 2002, hardcover)
Debra Magpie Earling begins this tale, set against the backdrop of a Montana Indian reservation, with a scene that sets the theme of obsessive love that pervades the novel; as well as introduce her strong narrative voice:
“When Louise White Elk was nine, Baptiste Yellow Knife blew a fine powder in her face and told her she would disappear. She sneezed until her nose bled, and Baptiste gave her his handkerchief. She had to lie down on the school floor and tilt back her head and even then it wouldn’t stop. She felt he had opened the river to her heart.”
A mixture of passion drive by mystical forces is at the heart of this story, literally and stylistically. Louise is the magnetic center driving three men—Baptiste, tribal officer Charlie Kicking Woman, and white man Harvey Stoner—to use their various spiritual, cultural, and economic powers in an attempt to obtain her. The struggle each man faces with his love for Louise leads them to push the limits of their powers, with violence the predictable outcome. The violence, often inflected on Louise, becomes too tortured at the end; and her suffering, white perhaps presented as an indictment of men’s attempts to control women, is countered by the presentation of Louise as a mythical force driving these men to these extremes. In this manner, the violence contains an unappealing level of justification.
As much as this novel fits into the American Indian literary genre, it equally defines itself as gothic with the descriptions of an open and barren Montana landscape; the driving obsessions of attractive characters with who cannot control their moral failings; and the convulsions of the story. To establish her gothic characters, struggling with love they cannot control, Earling presents alternating chapters from the perspectives of Louise, Charlie and Baptiste. Like planets that cannot control their gravitational forces, each floats in and out of each other’s lives with Louise as the sun. She is clearly an engaging character, with mythical skills and feminine charms; and as a gothic heroine, we have to accept at face value that every man she meets lusts for her. Charlie’s back and forth story, though, becomes wearying. After several encounters with Louise, we go from sharing his attempts to control his emotions with logic to feeling annoyed that he is too weak to consummate his lust nor save himself from it. And while the passion between Louise and Baptiste is real and tangible, the fact that his drunken rage drives him to attempt to physically disfigure her makes him a less than appealing figure.
Earling’s writing style is the real appeal her. Her ability at description and getting us inside each character makes draws us through the growing frustrations of the plot. The strongest writing occurs when Louise faces an unexpected tragedy in her family—in telling that story, Earling’s writing provides the necessary blend of physical description, character insight, and atmosphere that proves her strength as a writer. Unfortunately, the story after this scene does not match it, and fails to effectively use it to guide us to a powerful conclusion.
While the story and characters don’t ultimately sustain the strength of the writing, it presents a new voice that is worthy of our attention.
Next week . . . Fools Crow by James Welch.