Louise Erdrich

When Irene America discovers that her artist husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe-deposit box. There she records the truth about her life and marriage, while turning her Red Diary—hidden where Gil will find it—into a manipulative charade. As Irene and Gil fight to keep up appearances for their three children, their home becomes a place of increasing violence and secrecy. And Irene drifts into alcoholism, moving ever closer to the ultimate destruction of a relationship filled with shadowy need and strange ironies. Alternating between Irene's twin journals and an unflinching third-person narrative, Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag fearlessly explores the complex nature of love, the fluid boundaries of identity, and the anatomy of one family's struggle for survival and redemption.

A Novel

Shadow Tag

Daryl Houston

Whew, this one is darned near a five-star book for me. When I started, it and had the feeling that it was going to be a sort of torrid diary-entry type book, I sort of groaned internally, but there turned out to be very little of that (and some of it quite good).

I don't have a personal basis for understanding how some of the characters in the book behave, though I've read this sort of account enough times by now to understand that people do behave in the, to me, bizarre, irrational, wild ways they behave.

Books that center on artists, as this one does in part, pretty routinely interest me.

It wasn't much of a struggle to connect this book to books like Lessing's much longer, less enjoyable The Golden Notebook and, oddly, Wallace's Infinite Jest (lots of weird parallels between the two -- a genius otter-like kid, dispomaniac parents, a volatile father whose volatility leads to a dire outcome, an essentially post-modern treatment complete with blurring of boundaries between kitsch and art, sky and water motifs, and probably more that I thought of while falling asleep last night and have since forgotten).

I read this one pretty quickly -- the first 66 pages in one evening and the remaining 185 or so on a missed-bedtime second evening because I was so into the book. Sometimes I do this because I just want to get through a book that isn't very appealing to me, but in this case, both the story and the prose kept me going. Because I read it in a hurry, I know I missed a lot of nuance in how the historic references and the bits about art interwove with themes in the modern day setting. The book surely merits a later, more careful, reading.

Erdrich pretty consistently writes prose that goes down easily and is at the same time lyrical, and this book is no exception. The closing passage is one of the finest (lyrically, rhythmically, and in how it evokes) closing passages I can recall reading in any book.

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As most other reviewers have noted, Shadow Tag depicts the destructive marriage between Gil, a painter, and his Irene, the subject of most of his works. The story of their disintegrating marriage and dysfunctional family is dark and depressing. While the story was well-written, the completely unlikeable main characters and the relentlessly depressing mood made the story difficult to get through. As a nitpicky point, I didn't see the point in the author's style of eschewing quotation marks with dialogue.

I initially picked up this book since the premise of a story told through Irene's 2 different journals sounded interesting. However, there is very little in the book that is told through the journals. The ending, while not shocking, was in line with the rest of the hopelessly depressing story.

I can't say that I enjoyed this dark story, but I appreciate the author's talent in creating it.

Shadow Tag A Novel

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