Shadow Tag, by Louise Erdrich

This new book by Erdich chronicles the disintegration of a family. Father Gil, alcoholic and occasionally violent, is a successful artist whose subject is always his wife, Irene. His paintings of her veer towards the pornographic and exploitive on occasion. Irene, also always with a glass of wine in her hand, is a writer working on a thesis on George Caitlin and his paintings of Native Americans. She begins keeping two diaries when she learns her husband is reading hers. She secretes her true diary in a bank’s safety deposit box and continues write in her false one and leaves it where Gil can find it. Through the diary he reads, she seeks to manipulate and hurt him, particularly by implying that all three of their bewildered children are fathered by different men. They include teenager Florian, a math genius; their eleven year old daughter, Riel, who tries to control the chaos around her by hoarding survival gear for the entire family in her closet; and five year old son, Stoney, whose birth Irene sees as participating her loss of affection for his father. The ending of the novel is even more shocking than what precedes it. Although it is beautifully written in places, perhaps my view of this book is colored by what I know of Louise Erdrich’s marriage to fellow writer Michael Dorris, who committed suicide after being accused of abusing their children. I found it way too close to that situation and very depressing. 255 pp.