The Blue Jay's Dance by Louise Erdrich HarperCollins 223 pp. $21.00 Review by Mark Shechner Featured in BBR August Book reviewers have this in common with botanists: hours spent slogging through books that can be wetter, murkier and longer than the Great Dismal Swamp, in search of the occasional orchid, the obscure passage of splendor, for whose sake all the insects and bogwater are put up with. Don't let a reviewer ever tell you that he wouldn't at times gladly trade his pencil for a machete and hip waders. Louise Erdrich's The Blue Jay's Dance is a welcome time out from word-trekking: orchids everywhere and not a swamp in sight, just page after extravagant page of perambulations, doings and oratorios about the agony of child bearing (Erdrich has given birth to three daughters), the exhaustion of mothering, the metaphysics of wind, the erotics of the insect kingdom, the independence of cats, the comedy of a groundhog taking food from the toe of one's boot. Even when the author herself is deep in emotional shadows, lamenting that suicide would be redundant because there is no self left to kill, the reader feels out in the open. As an admirer of Erdrich's North Dakota tetralogy, Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks and The Bingo Palace, I had some fear that she might run dry after the stories about her mother's Turtle Mountain Chippewa people and her father's clan of high plains German-Americans. Those fears were groundless. The Blue Jay's Dance, a synthesized chronicle of Erdrich's experiences as a mother of daughters - three cycles of mothering blended into one - is a lucid, tender and dithyrambic meditation on the immediate sensations, the grounded passions and the cosmic implications of mothering, impregnated with Erdrich's trademark warmth and humor, her eye for natural things, her intuition for the choreography of human interaction, and something we have not seen before, a generous gift for philosophical speculation. Indeed, The Blue Jay's Dance suggests that what America has lacked all along it has at last: a philosopher-mother who can fill in the holes, the Carlsbad Caverns, in male knowledge and supply a picture of the human condition that is grounded in biological bedrock. (There is a flaw in Erdrich's sensory equipment to be sure, a relative tone-deafness that robs dialogue in her books of pungent and individual voices and takes music simply out of them.) A common theme in contemporary feminism is that American literature has never told the stories of women in the family: of daughterhood and motherhood, of caring for others and being cared for by them. Novelist Mary Gordon has made this a frequent complaint in her essays, which have been collected recently in Good Boys and Dead Girls. Erdrich quotes from an essay by novelist Jane Smiley titled "Can Mothers Think?" which proposes that "a mother's vision would encompass survival, would encompass the cleaning up of messes." Erdrich adds: A mother's vision includes tough nurturance, survival love, a demanding state of grace. It is a vision slowly forming from the body of work created by women. I imagine a wide and encompassing room filled with women lost in concentration. They are absorbed in the creation of an emotional tapestry, an intellectual quilt. The Blue Jay's Dance is Erdrich's patch for the common quilt, with tough nurturance, survival lore and states of grace abounding. Perhaps nothing so distinguishes Erdrich as her balance: she seems so little given to grinding axes or loading dice. If she has an attitude, I fail to see it, which is all the more remarkable in light of her tough-mindedness. It is as though the pains and pleasures of living are given equal weight and she writes out of a finely-calibrated moral and sensory equilibrium. Thus her metaphysical effusions are balanced by the cold eye she casts on the pain, the grind and friction of mothering. She takes offense at the happy-mothering advice pregnant women are bombarded with: Most of the instructions given to pregnant woman is as chirpy and condescending as the usual run of maternity clothes - the wide tops with droopy bows slung beneath the neck, the T-shirts with arrows pointing to what can't be missed, the childish sailor collars, puffed sleeves, and pastels. It is cute advice - what to pack in the hospital bag (don't forget a toothbrush, deodorant, a comb or hair dryer) - or it's worse: pseudo-spiritual, misleading, silly, and even cruel. Some days Erdrich finds herself so weary that "I can't get enough distance on myself to define what I am feeling": I walk through a tunnel from one house to the other. It is dark, scraped out of the emotional mess of life, as gray and ridged as an esophagus. I'm being swallowed alive. On those days, suicide is an idea too persistent for comfort. And yet, for all the drudgery and exasperation: With each birth I have been thrown into a joy of the physical emotions, a religious and fixated delight that seizes me so thoroughly the life of the imagination sometimes seems a spare place. The grounded pleasures - nursing, touching the exquisite fontanel of our baby, a yellow-pink fragrance of sun-heated cotton and tepid cream, gazing eternally into her mystery eyes - are only tempered by sleep deprivation. One surrenders easily to such language, so effortlessly poised between the quotidian and the vast, the slogging and the exalted, and set down with such aplomb, such sure-footed sentence craft, such SprachgefŸhl. It does seem that long views absorb the short ones, that the teething, crying, raging babies and their mother's "helpless and devouring love" dissolve into cosmic horizons. Erdrich emerges here more the religious writer than the social one, the book's true signature being a bred-in-the-bone spirituality that we might as well call religion. Despite the stifling Catholic education imposed upon Erdrich on the reservation, whose symbol is the sex-obsessed Sister Leopolda of Love Medicine, the only faith that amounts to anything in her spiritual life is a paganism that finds nourishment, purpose and wisdom in nature. Nature is a study house in which all the vital lessons we need to absorb between birth and death may be found. During their years in New Hampshire - the events in this book date back five years ago and more - Erdrich and her husband, writer Michael Dorris, lived in the countryside, where their constant companions were owls, hawks, woodchucks (from the Cree wuchak), ducks, luna moths, skunks, deer, jumping spiders, phoebes and nuthatches, red foxes, tame and feral cats and blue jays. All came calling, and all left behind instructional calling cards. (Like Thoreau in Walden, Erdrich places the human fauna in her life into the deep background, including husband Michael and their adopted sons. They are only footnotes to this story.) Mothering is absorbed into a great cycle of life that begins with love and ends in death. The giant luna moth that clings to Erdrich's screen one summer night is a messenger from the land of desire and mortality. She will live for a week, mouthless, a being with one clear purpose. All of this ethereal complexity exists to mate and lay eggs, of course. I pity her for a moment and then I don't want to think about her anymore. She's very troublesome! She is a function of her species life cycle. I put down my pen. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sex is the apparition, the engine, the driven inner workings of all that shines and breathes. The need to write and to reproduce are both all absorbing tasks that attempt to partake of the future. Dim wings will close over our conniving brains no matter what and so we lose ourselves most happily in tasks that partake of the eternal. If the luna moth is a memento mori, the blue jay that bluffs down a marauding hawk is an instructor in true grit, a victor over the easy acceptance of fate as well as the hawk's talons. Its feathers distended, it leaps, shrieks and pedals its feet in the air until the hawk, larger and better equipped, flees in confusion. Erdrich draws the moral: Past the gray moralizing and the fierce Roman Catholic embrace of suffering and fate...there is the blue jay's dance. Beyond the impossible corners, stark cliffs, dark wells of trapped longing, there is that manic, successful jig - cocky, exuberant, entirely a bluff, a joke. That dance makes me clench down hard on life. This is how the spirit world communicates, through these envoys. It is tempting to credit this animism to the Native American side of Erdrich's heritage - in fact it is inevitable - though American literature is peppered with it, from Emerson and Thoreau to the Annie Dillard of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This suppressed Native-American paganism may be America's own hidden, recessive faith. Certainly the homespun and non-dogmatic way Erdrich applies it to her own life makes it seem like a homeopathic remedy to our common spiritual ailments. Erdrich's "philosophy" wouldn't matter quite so much were she not so superb a writer whose prose possesses credentials of its own. If style is the paraphrase of a philosophy, we may find meaning in the rapturous style itself, with its liquid phrases and its vision of everything interfused with everything else. Nothing is wasted; no event lacks its corona of magic. Listening to the "great magnetic ocean of wind," Erdrich reflects: If there is a vegetative soul, an animating power that all things share, there must be great rejoicing out there on windy days, ecstasy, for trees move so slowly on calm days. At least it seems that way to us. On days of high wind they move so freely it must give them a cellular pleasure close to terror. Here are poetry and philosophy conjoined: the rejoicing of the trees become the exhortation of the writer, calling upon us to listen up. This is religion as it was before monotheism, trinitarianism, ayatollism, rabbinism put nature worship to the sword and squeezed our instinctual awe of the universe down into theology. Erdrich's voice speaks to us from our own repressed past, our own biological circuits, our raw pre-Enlightenment selves, our own sense of deep connection and veiled purpose, which have become so overlain with the steel and concrete of modern life that we content ourselves with being soulless postmoderns even as we long to head for the woods and commune with our own greater selves. Erdrich seems to be in touch with what we used to know, our ancient awareness of this earth as both spirit and matter, as both school and habitation. Are we prepared for philosophy from a writer who can be casually funny or even "cute" (in her winking, whimsical, and unsystematic manner of writing, not her appearance), a Native-American and a mother, unschooled in formal philosophy and innocent of dialectics, who mixes homilies with recipes, can and does write while nursing, and keeps her seed catalogs on the same shelf with the Tao Te Ching? With The Blue Jay's Dance, a slim volume though it may be, Louise Erdrich is making her bid to become our modern day Thoreau, declaring motherhood the antidote to abstraction, declaring bodies and appetites to be at the center of spirituality, and citing nature as proof. And bidding us to listen up. Should we not? Mark Shechner is Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. He has written widely about fiction and American-Jewish writers and is presently at work on a book about the resurgence of nationalist and populist sentiments in contemporary American fiction. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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