Shadow Tag

I've been a fan of Louise Erdrich's novels for a while now, but I hadn't come across Shadow Tag from 2010. It's unlike the other Erdrich novels I've read in that it focuses in narrowly on the dynamics of a marriage and its ultimate breakdown. Irene America is the wife and muse to painter Gil, and mother of their three children. When she realises that Gil has been reading her diary, she starts to write deliberate lies for him to read; mistrust, alcohol and violence brew a destructive mix.

The parts of this novel I enjoyed the most were probably the sections written from the perspectives of the three children, who are trying to hold it together while their parents are falling apart. Erdrich writes exceptionally well about family relationships and the currents of feeling that flow between parents and children, and between siblings. As a parent of seven children and a survivor of several relationships, she obviously has a lot of experience in this area. 

I did pick up one slip, where a side character is referred to just once as 'Louise' rather than 'May.' Erdrich has written herself into at least one other novel as a character and I wonder if she initially intended to do the same here, changed her mind, and let this one reference slide through uncorrected. Shadow Tag feels like an outlier in Erdrich's oeuvre and while at first I feared it might be a dull middle class marriage story, there was a lot more going on -- about images, art and ownership, identity and parenthood.