Susan Taylor Chehak

Lately I've been finding that many of the novels I'm reading have hidden narrators -- that is, we don't know who is telling the story until we get to the end, or close to it. Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, Richard Powers' Generosity, Phillip Dick's Valis. (Also Ian McEwan's Atonement, though I read that one a long time ago.) (And as it turns out, I've been doing the same thing with my own work -- The Great Disappointment.) Am I coming upon these by serendipity, or is it a trend? And if a trend, then what does that mean?

The latest version of the phenomenon comes in Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag. Here we have two diaries, one blue and one red. The blue one is the real one -- Irene keeps it hidden away in a safe deposit box where her husband, Gil, can't get to it. The red one is the fake one, left where he can find it, because she understands that he's been reading it and she writes it now as a response to what she sees as an invasion of her privacy. There's more to this, of course -- she loves him and hates him; he is obsessed with her. He's a painter; she's his subject; he has stolen her soul. They struggle with this through the book -- she wants him to leave but he won't and she can't. She uses the red diary to drive him crazy. It all ends badly. This is a sad book. A dark book. Evil, in a way, but also gripping.

(Whoa. Evil? Really? Yes, maybe because the story seems to be a fictional version of a true relationship -- between Louise Erdrich and her husband Michael Dorris -- which also ended badly, in real life.)

(More on this, soon: fiction and real life -- why some of my women friends can't abide a Quentin Tarantino film because of the violence -- one walked out after 1/2 hour of Inglourious Basterds -- but think The Hurt Locker is one of the finest films they've seen in a long time. Me? I love Tarantino -- I know that violence isn't real. But The Hurt Locker -- I couldn't watch it. Too painful. Too real. Because it IS real. Yes, more on this later...)

With the Erdrich book, there isn't really a sense that we are dealing with a hidden narrator until the end, and yet, there are clues. Early on I was stopped in my tracks while reading when I came upon a grammatical error that almost had me lying the book aside. Such an error, it was so blatant, I couldn't figure out, how could this be? Erdrich didn't see it? The editor missed it? The copy editor? Seems impossible, so it must be intentional, but why? The error, if you haven't guessed already, was an especially egregious misuse of the verb "to lie." A common error, people do it all the time in speech (my sister often says, "I was laying down" or "I'm going to go lay down for a while") and often in writing (I am forever correcting it in student work)usually using the transitive conjugation when it should be intransitive, but here? Here it was the opposite, using the intransitive for the transitive: "She lay her head on the table," or something like that.

I was ready to quit reading at that point. The book seemed so dismal anyway, and then such a careless error... but I just couldn't believe it was intentional... so... why? I know that Navajo blanket weavers purposely weave a flaw in the work, in order not to offend the gods with something that claims perfection, and I wondered... is this why? Leaving in a purposeful flaw to create a beautiful thing?

A good answer, maybe, but there's more to it than that. There is a hidden narrator at work, one who would be just the sort of writer to make that mistake in her text, and it's not until the end, when that narrator is revealed, that we understand what it is we have been reading. And then, knowing what we know, we have to go back and read the whole book all over again.

Honestly, I love when that happens.