Shadow Tag: A Novel (edition 2010)

For the writing it should be a 4, but I just struggle with the level of angst ( )

Surprising ending!

Falling in love is also falling into knowledge. Enduring love comes when we love most of what we learn about the other person and can tolerate the faults they cannot change. (29)

What he truly thought was that there would come a moment where he could truly reach Irene and that moment would change everything. (149) (Following Fitzgerald quote, "It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal...")

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Louise Erdrich is turning out to be one of my favorite novelists. This novel moved and disturbed me in the biggest way. I finished this at the beginning of this month, but I've been avoiding writing a review on it because I really don't know what to say. I can over-simplify and give everyone a few adjectives on how it made me feel, or I can try and manage a few sentences and nothing more.

Gil--artistic, desperate, abusive, obsessed with a woman he tries to glorify in life but ends up suffocating her with his neediness. He has a love/hate thing going for Irene, whom he claims to love passionately, yet he manages to degrade her through his art.

Irene America: alcoholic, manipulative, desperate to escape Gil, seething with resentment, yet unable to break away from the man she claims to loathe.

The surprise ending made me almost throw the book across the room, but I think it only made things seem true to life. Typical, even.

So far, my favorite book for the year. ( )

What would you do if you caught someone reading your diary? If you caught your spouse snooping in your inner-most thoughts, how angry would you be? In Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag, Irene America is a woman in an abusive marriage, who discovers that her husband has been reading her diary. Instead of lashing out, she takes advantage — she starts a secret journal and uses her diary to manipulate her violent husband, Gil.

Gil is an artist and Irene is his muse. His iconic paintings of his wife have brought him tremendous success, but they have also pigeonholed him as a Native American artist:

“Don’t paint Indians. The subject wins. You’ll never be an artist. You’ll be an American Indian artist…Still, Gil had no choice. He painted Indians when he painted his wife because he couldn’t help it — the ferocity between them, the need. Her blood ancestors came out in Gil’s paint as he worked.”

There is certainly ferocity between them. There is evidence of great passion, but it is passion that has turned sour and gone wrong. Irene has fallen out of love with Gil and I am never really certain whether Gil adores Irene or despises her. He goes out of his way to antagonize her, buying her expensive gifts she doesn’t want and throwing parties that she will hate. He ridicules her in person and on canvas — he paints her nude, in demeaning positions — but she continues to model for him. They are locked in a sort of mortal combat; they hurt each other terribly but they just can’t break away.

“Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.”

I love the way that story is both subtle and jarring. There are hints of violence and unhappiness, then there is a sudden slap. Gil dotes on his children, praising their unique qualities, then he slams his son’s forehead into the table. The family orbits around Gil, pandering to his mercurial moods — especially the children — knowing when to pull away, when to hide. Even the dogs are sensitive to it, milling around and putting themselves physically between Gil and the children. The children seem too wise, too knowing, and then Erdrich sneaks up on you with something shocking.

Read my full review at Alive on the Shelves. ( )

Erdrich is, without a doubt, a magical writer. She weaves words into images and emotions as exquisitely as her Native-American ancestors wove colourful tales into their blankets.

Unfortunately, ‘Shadow Tag’ has a dark edge that’s not to my taste. When I think of ‘The Painted Drum’, ‘The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No-Horse’ or ‘The Master Butcher’s Singing Club’, I remember stories that wrung my emotions but left me with a sense of hope; a sliver of illumination that highlighted the essential strength and courage of her characters despite their very human flaws.

In ‘Shadow Tag’, a story about a disintegrating marriage, the love/hate relationship between Gil (an artistic genius)and Irene (his wife and model) has too dark an edge. Irene has a spitefulness that I disliked, but Gil was by no means her innocent victim. Emotionally stunted, his art his only real passion, Gil was only slightly more sympathetic than Irene.

I finished this book compulsively, as I do all Erdrich’s books, simply because her adroit use of words, her evocative imagery and the raw emotion of her characters makes for compulsive reading. But a melancholy has lingered in my heart, because ‘Shadow Tag’ is an unrelentingly grim story. ( )