by Louise Erdrich.

HarperCollins. 314 pages. $25.95.

BY MARK DUNKELMAN
    Special to the Journal

Pluto is a dying town in the northern Great Plains, moldering away at the edge of an Ojibwe reservation in western North Dakota, home to a dwindling number of residents of tangled bloodlines. This is the preserve of Louise Erdrich, award-winning author of 10 acclaimed novels expertly set in this milieu, a seasoned guide to the remote reaches of human nature, and a master storyteller at the peak of her powers.

So it seems to me — this book being my introduction to Erdrich, who also owns a Minnesota bookstore and has written nonfiction, poetry and children’s books. Her devotees will not be disappointed with her latest effort. The Plague of Doves is gripping from beginning to end.

It opens with a brief, chilling glimpse of a killing at a family farm in 1911. Then the time shifts; the story that gives the book its title is told, and stories proceed to scroll by like the shadows of clouds crossing the prairie. As several main characters in turn tell their tales, they quote the stories of others, adding layers of story upon story.

Erdrich captures Native American oral traditions with perfect pitch: the stately cadence, the sinuous snaking of stories, the easy leap from the mundane into the magical. The voices of generations alternate, blending times into patchwork. Gradually the various tellers quilt their tales together, spanning the years and converging in the present, solving the mystery of the murder.

The handful of main characters tell their own stories and are chronicled in the stories of others. Relationships are revealed, tying people together in webs of circumstance. As time approaches the present, characters fade into remembrance, leaving a small group of survivors to sort out the story.

It all plays out against a landscape that Erdrich paints with spare, but telling, strokes. Crumbling Pluto may be a place out of time, but the plains it inhabits are timeless, a place where stories spin out and are carried away on the winds. Louise Erdrich, her ear to the breeze, catches them, reconstitutes them, and presents them to us as full-bodied voices speaking to us with the intimacy of a close conversation. THE PLAGUE OF DOVES,

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