Shadow Tag by Louise Erdich

I read Erdrich's Plague of Doves a few years ago and while I thought it was pretty good, I didn't love it.  However, when I read a review of this book in the New York Times Book Review, the plot intrigued me immediately: a woman whose marriage is falling apart realizes that her husband has been reading her diary, so she begins to keep a second, secret, diary for herself.

This was, indeed, quite a book.  Thankfully it was not as epistolary as that description would indicate - while there are some excerpts from both diaries, the book is mostly told in a traditional narrative.  Erdrich could have written this book in several different ways based on this idea, but her choice of execution was excellent in its avoidance of relying on an obvious gimmick.  The only unusual stylistic choice was a lack of quotation marks around conversation, which (intentionally I believe) created a fuzzy boundary between internal and external dialogue.

This book tells the story of the dissolution of a troubled marriage and the impact on all the members of the family.  The husband is a painter who has been supporting the family by selling a variety of pieces of artwork depicting his wife.  Like Plague of Doves, Native American culture is strongly featured, along with many of its current societal challenges, including alcoholism and violence.  Not to say that the situations these characters find themselves in are uniquely Native American - clearly they are not.  But this heritage plays a strong role in character development.

The book is reasonably short and simply written, and yet somehow Erdrich managed to weave a very complex story.  The writing was very good and I was tempted to return to the first page and read it all over again when I was done - not because there were many hidden meanings or a surprise ending, but because I wanted to appreciate for a second time the beauty, delicacy, and pain that Erdrich depicted.