The Plague of Doves Themes

Almost everyone in Pluto—North Dakota, the fictional town at the center of Louise Erdrich’s 2008 novel The Plague of Doves—is related; as narrator Judge Coutts puts it, “nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood.” And because the story’s characters are linked not through their present-day proximity but through their complicated shared histories, no relationship is ever quite what it seems. Young Evelina, for example, is crushed to learn that…

Early in The Plague of Doves, an octogenarian named Mooshum tells his young granddaughter Evelina that “there is no justice here on eart[h].” Like many of his fellow residents in (fictional) Pluto, North Dakota, Mooshum is haunted by the town’s 1911 lynching, in which a group of white vigilantes hanged three young Indian men as punishment for a crime they did not actually commit. And while Mooshum and his community see this lynching as…

Evelina Harp, the first of many narrators in Louise Erdrich’s sprawling 2008 epic The Plague of Doves, brags often of her family’s reputation for “deathless romantic encounters.” Indeed, nearly every person in Evelina’s family line—and in the larger community that surrounds her in her town of Pluto, North Dakota—has been pushed to recklessness by sexual or romantic passion. Evelina’s uncle John Wildstrand fakes his own wife’s kidnapping and steals the ransom money for…

Many of the characters in Pluto, North Dakota, the fictional town at the heart of Louise Erdrich’s novel The Plague of Doves, struggle to find comfort and certainty in religious faith. Some, like Evelina’s mother Clemence, take comfort in Catholic ideas of heaven and hell; others, like Clemence’s father Mooshum, rely on their ancestors’ Chippewa cosmology, imagining an afterlife filled with herds of buffalo and flocks of flapping doves; still…