The Master Butchers Singing Club, by Louise Erdrich

Like the lack of an apostrophe on its cover—is it really just missing? Or is it a singing club for master butchers? Should I have to wait until the second-to-last chapter to find out?—something in this novel is not quite right. The pacing? The character? Erdrich’s insistence on adding an Indian character (whose heritage is, in fact, totally irrelevant)? The lurking feeling throughout the book that something really truly earth-shattering is going to happen?

I should warn you, right up front, that nothing earth-shattering happens. If you happen to purchase a copy with the back-cover blurb that claims “the earth moves” when Delphine meets F, don’t believe it. Nothing moves at all, not even the plot. While it’s a pleasant enough story of a family and their complicated relations to their towns, their countries, their careers, and each other, it’s better suited to one of those vanity press-published family histories, rather than a major novel. And perhaps this is precisely what Erdrich intended: the characters are, rather loosely, based on her own German ancestors and their own immigration to North Dakota.

Basically, nothing in this novel hangs together to create an actually coherent plot. At one point, Delphine meditates on the idea of her life as a story line; Erdrich doesn’t mention it, but she must have felt quite disappointed. It’s the story line of everyone’s life: up here, down there, something small here, something small there. And, as such, it made me wonder why Delphine’s story line deserves a book, whereas my own will stay safely ensconced in my own journals, and lost forever after I die.

The characters are all pleasant enough, and the events, such as they are, interesting enough, but nothing really hangs together. Like the relationship between Delphine and her supposed best friend, with whom she never spends time, or her sham marriage to a gay Indian war veteran circus performer, something is not quite right here. Neither of those relationships is as they should be, and nor is the novel. I’m not sorry I wasted my time—Erdrich had her moments, including a particularly convincing bad English from a German (“I wish to Seattle to go”), and a book is rarely, if ever, a waste of time (though Moby Dick has a lot to answer for, with all those chapters about the cranial structure of sperm whales)—but I certainly don’t recommend it.