The Master Butcher’s Singing Club has a built-in element of particular interest to it since it is a novel by Louise Erdrich. Erdrich is, after all, a writer who has constructed a heady reputation for being one of the foremost chroniclers of the Native American experience, especially that related to what it generally referred to as the Chippewa tribe among Americans in other regions of the country. Her parentage is only half Chippewa, however, and for that matter, her mother is also half-French. The stories she has published thanks to the influence of interest about that aspect of her heritage has thus made her a leading figure in relating the experience of the only residents of the continent who are not here by virtue of colonial and American immigration policies. It is within that context that The Master Butcher’s Singing Club gains an organic component of interest, for in this book Erdrich turns the focus of her attention away from the maternal background to the paternal.
Despite this shift from the natives settlers of the Great Lakes region to the German immigrant still retains a sense of unity and coherent with her previous novels as a result of the book bringing another story to the history of Argus, a North Dakota town also featured in some previous works. That is not the only connection. This addition of this novel to existing stories that have created a sort of loosely constructed Erdrich-verse, if you will, will not be a jarring experience to those who have followed her career. Even though this is the first of her novels to specifically situated a story and characters that take a deep dive into the German half of her ancestry, the characters who finally rise to prominence do exist entirely in a vacuum.
Throughout her body of work that has, indeed, focused on Native American experiences, Erdrich has already brought to bear on them an awareness among readers of her Germanic descent. References, allusions and oblique hints all point to the inescapably dominant presence of German settlers in the region about which she sets her stories. The protagonist of The Master Butcher’s Singing Club, Fidelis Waldvogel, has an origin story as a German-American which is quite likely shared by an inestimable number of those who call the vast lands encircling the Great Lakes home: on his way to his planned destination farther west, he simply ran out of money by the time he made it to the Dakotas. It is very likely that thousands of families living around the broader Great Lakes region can trace their history to a single man or various members of an extended family running out of their limited funds in Ohio or Michigan or Wisconsin or Minnesota or somewhere else on the way that fell way short of their intended destination. It is, quite literally, the story of America. Or, rather, it is one individual aspect of a larger interconnected tapestry.
The book’s arrival into already previously existing collection of Erdrich’s expansive multi-volume story about those who were already here when the first European immigrants arrive mirrors that tapestry. Erdrich has spent decades exploring the culture and generations that can legitimately identify themselves as native Americans. And then, just when everybody is settled comfortably into that being the story of America, along comes some Europeans to upset the balance of everything. And truly, that really qualifies as the story of America for a great many.
