Scenes From A Marriage

JUST LOOKING AT HER AS SHE SITS IN a deli in Minneapolis, you'd never suspect this woman is one of the most celebrated writers of her generation--or that she's been through hell in the past year. Louise Erdrich is dressed in jeans and a turtleneck; her red winter coat is draped over the back of her chair. She smiles, laughs easily. But then she begins talking about all the letters of support she got after the much-publicized suicide last April of her estranged husband, the writer Michael Dorris. ""I had never requested kindness before,'' she says, dabbing at her eyes with a paper napkin. ""And all of a sudden it was keeping me and my children alive.''

Erdrich, 43, has come for an interview with NEWSWEEK, to talk about her seventh and latest novel, The Antelope Wife (256 pages. HarperCollins. $24). But there's no way to avoid the subject--especially since ""The Antelope Wife,'' which Erdrich says she'd finished before Dorris's death, involves a husband who's left by his wife and descends into alcoholism, obsession and, finally, suicide. ""It was written by a writer who was afraid of what was about to happen and didn't know how to stop it,'' she says, almost in a whisper. ""It was written out of dread.'' Erdrich's readers will recognize the shifting narrative perspectives, the lyrical prose, the surrealist humor and the familiar themes: ill-fated love, unalterable ancestral patterns and the political forces molding the lives of Native Americans. But they'll also recognize echoes of her own family's tragedy.

Erdrich began ""The Antelope Wife'' three years ago; she had just finished it when Dorris washed down pills with a bottle of vodka and tied a plastic bag over his head in a New Hampshire motel room. They had been separated for more than a year and were barely speaking. Their marriage, Erdrich now says, had suffered since the terrible trauma of the 1991 death of their older adopted son, Abel, who was hit by a car. ""That was a huge blow,'' she says. ""These things tend to isolate people and make them go deeper and change. I know very few people who could have stayed together after that.'' Only after Dorris's suicide was it reported that he, the author of the moving family memoir ""The Broken Cord,'' had been under investigation for sexually abusing two of their three biological daughters. ""I don't think it's fair to talk about this since he can't defend himself,'' says Erdrich. ""I don't think I ever want to address it.''

Erdrich's editors at HarperCollins worried about how the press would handle the eerily prescient plot of ""The Antelope Wife,'' and briefly floated the idea of making the husband's suicide less central; in the end, no significant changes were made. Rozin, the wife in the book, repeatedly tries to leave the marriage--not unlike the wife in Dorris's 1997 novel, ""Cloud Chamber.'' After her husband's suicide, Rozin overcomes feelings of guilt and marries her lover. Erdrich's real life wasn't so tidy. With her husband dead, his estate contested in court by their adopted daughter, Madeline, and conflicting accounts of the family's life appearing in the media, Erdrich felt fiercely protective of her kids and racked with guilt. ""You are not supposed to take responsibility for another person's decision,'' she says. ""But it's impossible not to.'' And transmuting her premonitions into art didn't prove entirely therapeutic. ""It was as though I was trying to prepare myself for what might happen. But it didn't come near to being helpful to me. It shows a poverty of my imagination.''

These days, Erdrich says she's ""recommitting to hanging in,'' and she's fallen back into the sustaining patterns of life. Her parents help; they live less than three hours away. Erdrich wakes every morning at 6:30 to get her daughters off to school. She's reached out to Madeline and her other adopted son, Sava, settling their disputes with her husband's estate. Madeline, in fact, drops by the deli during the interview, and they hug their hellos. ""Write this down,'' Erdrich says. ""Maddie is a brave person and I love her.'' Erdrich is also taking piano lessons and Chippewa-language classes and is working on a children's book and--of course--a new novel. She and the children do normal things, like going to see ""Titanic.'' Did it make her cry? Well, not exactly. But Erdrich says the scene where the crew tries to avoid hitting the iceberg haunted her. ""I thought about it for a long time. I thought the two of us had been doing that for years. Michael had his hands on the wheel, we were both trying to steer. Only in opposite directions. And we ended up hitting it dead on.''

© 1998