At last, those friends who don't know the truth about Damien see his long devotion to Little No Horse as saintly the few who have sensed Agnes inside the impostor believe the same, with even more conviction.Įrdrich, who was raised a Catholic, admits that making her main character a woman priest has a feminist aspect, but adds, "I don't really think it is about gender in the larger sense. The daily contacts between priest and parishioners deepen over the decades into an enduring, if unconventional, love story, thoroughly reciprocal. Small, vivid answers emerge in Erdrich's episodic narrative. What help can a missionary from the conquering side bring them?
These people have been deprived of their ancestral lands and hence the sustaining spirits of their culture they are stalled between past and future.
From 1912 to 1996, Agnes, disguised as Damien and thus a sham as both man and priest, tries to bring Roman Catholicism to the Ojibwes of Little No Horse reservation on a lonely patch of North Dakota. Now these two merge into one person.Īccept that odd premise-Erdrich makes it seem marvelously plausible-and the novel's overarching theme becomes poignantly clear. Erdrich's fans have met Father Damien Modeste and Agnes DeWitt before. If they show up, they have to show up."īut just because Nanapush, the raffishly funny Ojibwe storyteller, and various members of the Kashpaw clan-major players in other Erdrich books-show up again in The Last Report doesn't mean that the new novel stints on surprises. "I stopped being concerned about whether the same characters show up or not. Recognizing that all her books are parts of a larger saga eased her mind, she says, about repeating herself. Strapped to her chest in a Baby Bjorn carrier is Azure, the infant daughter whom the author, 46, bore in early January to an Ojibwe father whose identity she is keeping to herself. "A few years ago, I finally decided that I was working on one long novel," Erdrich says, sitting in a comfortable chair in Birchbark Books, the store she opened last June in a residential neighborhood in Minneapolis. Will not surprise Louise Erdrich's constant readers that a number of people from her previous fiction reappear in her enchanting and absorbing new novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (HarperCollins 361 pages $26).
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