Louise Erdrich has been described as one of the greatest American writers, and this collection lives up to that billing. There are all the usual little writerly things – the disarming understatement of her phrasing, the elegance of structure, the graceful layering of meaning under apparent simplicity – while she still manages to avoid the problem of contrivance.
Many of the stories collected in Python’s Kiss (please, ignore the terrible title and the gaudy packaging) were originally published in The New Yorker. Yet Erdrich’s pure talent prevents them from ever becoming too New Yorker-y.
Maybe it’s a Minnesotan thing, since the best story I’ve read in The New Yorker in years was by Callan Wink, another native of that state. Erdrich, despite having won the Pulitzer Prize, runs an independent bookshop there (specialising in Indigenous American writing), while Wink works as a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone river. Maybe it’s the groundedness implied by having another job, or the incorporation of Indigenous American narratives, that makes their writing so enjoyable. Or maybe it’s that writers such as Erdrich, like many great Irish writers, are far enough away from the perceived centre of things to remember how to write essentially, without the pomp and bullshit (I’m thinking here of John McGahern, among others).
The stories are almost all of small-town life, although there are some high-concept exceptions, such as an uploaded afterlife and a haunting in Venice. There are dogs left in cages, feral cats, women who fall in love with stones, mouldy wedding dresses, the tragedy of a shot horse. These are hopeful and sad and wistful lives, lives of people trying their best. Every story is intriguing, most are funny, many poignant. Their tone isn’t a million miles from Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, although with more warmth and mysticism. Also, although it’s a tired comparison, they did remind me of Raymond Carver and of Annie Proulx (two more writers who come from remote places).
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Maybe what makes Erdrich’s writing so vital is that in such places of seasons and wide nights and animals, the fact of death is more present, and thus more visible to the writer’s eye. Or maybe it’s just the boredom of those hideous, Minnesotan winters.
