Small Town Prairie Life Presented in a Slowly Assembled Puzzle
A violin that seemingly causes the inadvertent death of one brother in the Peace family at the hands of another magically calls out to its next owner, an Ojibwe Indian named Shamengwa, after drifting about a lake in an empty canoe for twenty years, only to return to the modern-day Peace family via theft. A man quietly evolves his stamp collecting to include "disaster stamps," that is, stamps on letters associated with tragedies such as the Titanic. A locust-like invasion of white doves in 1896 accidentally brings together Seraph Milk, known now as Mooshum, with his life's love, Junesse, to form the family line of the young Evelina Harp, part white and part Ojibwe. A violin recording that reaches a "strange sweetness" lulls a crying infant to sleep and perhaps saves her life amidst a horrific family slaughter. Many years later, a violin once again exacts a form of revenge on that infant's family's murderer.

Louise Erdrich brings together the great silent expanses of the northern plains, the uneasy truce between White and Native Americans, and a touch of pantheistic, tribal mysticism to tell the story of three generations' residents in the unlikely town of Pluto, North Dakota. Ostensibly named before the planet Pluto was discovered, this Pluto nevertheless contains elements of both the mythological Greek underworld and the end of the solar system. If the end of the world (North Dakota) can have its own, slowly dying end of the world, Pluto is it.

The 1911 tragedy that left behind the surviving infant involved a brutal family slaying of a farm family - parents, a teenage girl, and her two younger brothers. In a racially-charged act of vigilante justice, three Indian men and a young boy who happened upon the murder scene several days later are hanged by a gang of white men. Miraculously, the boy survives the hanging. These twin acts of violence, set against the arbitrariness of Pluto's founding and the harshness of prairie life at a reservation's edge, create the stage upon which the town's Twentieth Century lives are played out in a context surpassingly unaffected by the rest of Twentieth Century history.

The balance of Erdrich's story chronicles the circuitous and complex interplay of white and Indian lives in the generations since those early days. Even as the vitality of their town fades away, the residents of Pluto live out their lives beneath the unsettling racist overhang of those unresolved murders and the subsequent "rough justice" meted out by whites to an innocent group of Ojibwes. Despite these faint currents of unease, family lines cross, races intermarry, and the descendants of victims intermingle with the descendants of victimizers.

Erdrich tells her story through multiple voices, predominantly those of the modern-day adolescent Evelina Harp and her uncle by marriage, Judge Antone Bazil Coutts. Their stories are interrupted by that of Marn Wolde, whose bizarre marriage to the cult-like Billy Peace forms one of the novel's strangest and most disassociated interludes, As each voice is heard and then heard again, the lives of Pluto's residents, past and present, slowly take form and cohere into relationships, patterns, and even repetitions. Judge Coutts, for example, reluctantly sells his house to the developer husband of his long-term paramour only to have the developer experience an echo of the dove plague when he sets out to demolish the structure. In the book's final pages a new, fourth voice appears, that of Doctor Cordelia Lochren, and it is through her workmanlike testimonial that many of Pluto's most enduring mysteries are finally resolved.

THE PLAGUE OF DOVES is a story of ancestral legacies passed down through and between families and races, tracing the manner in which those legacies affect the lives of descendants. Some are mystical and some are explicitly acknowledged, while others are ever present but never mentioned. Through it all, however, we are in Ms. Erdrich's view products both of our own making as well as all that came before us.

Glad I read it
I love her stories and will keep on buying them. The pacing of this one was a bit odd, and I think the explanation is to be found in the notes at the end where you learn that various parts were published as free standing short stories in various magazines. Oh well. I was glad to have stuck it out and taken the time. I found it worth reading.

A fantastic read...
To be sure, this is not "Love Medicine," and the days of Lipsha Morrissey and family seem to be a dying ember, flickering off in the distant horizon. Nonetheless, Ms. Erdrich is a tremendously gifted writer, with a talent for weaving together stories that are absolutely mesmerizing. This is no different.

I Can Understand the Hoopla - to a Point
There were parts of this three generational book that were absolutely terrific. The members of oldest generation had spirit, uniqueness and depth. The second generation was a void. The third a mishmash that never found a voice that resonated. I looked forward to any scene that had the old men or the retrospective scenes.

The book, chronologically but not as written, starts with the lynching of Indians falsely accused of a massacreing a family, of which an infant survives. One of the group of Indians is spared and the yarn commences through him and his future generations. The telling is extremely disjointed. Only at the end are the relationships of some of the characters finally connected. This disjointedness really detracted from the book and the lack of continuity was aided by frequent use of nicknames which made character identification difficult.

The descendants of the lynching mob and victims stay in the area and relationships are formed. After two generations, I missed the point - do the youth really care? Should the reader? It seemed the lynching tale was merely a vehicle to bring together disparate character studies.

The good parts of the book - which were very good - offset the bad to make this a mediocre novel. It may have done much better as a collection of short stories with no pretense of connection.

Interesting read but not satisfying
Though very well written and interesting in parts, I had a hard time feeling satisfied with the book as a novel. It was disjointed and had so many characters that I couldn't keep everyone straight. A family tree diagram would have been helpful. The ending and reveal of the murderer was totally flat with no motive given for the killings. It didn't even make sense. I found some of the sexual situations too descriptive for good taste. It seemed that they were more gratuitous than actually necessary for the plot. I plodded along through the whole book hoping that in the end it would all come together. But when I was finished, I wondered why I had bothered to read it. I was very disappointed with the book as a whole.