The Hollow Children by Louise Erdrich, 2022
The magic trick:
Verifying early in the story for the reader that the people in the story lived to tell the tale; but then painting a surrealistically horror show of events
We close our week of Louise Erdrich stories with a far more recent entry than the previous four, which were all from the first decade of her career.
No slippage quality wise here, though. “The Hollow Children,” published in The New Yorker three years ago, is excellent.
It’s historical fiction, taking us back a century to a particularly bad blizzard in what I assume is rural Minnesota. A farmer and part-time school-bus driver is trying to beat the odds and get his bus full of school children home safely just as the blizzard hits. Erdrich masterfully describes the peak of terror for this man as some combination of snow blindness and stress-induced brain fog push his tale into the surreal. It’s pretty scary stuff, and we’re genuinely not sure about what has actually just happened to this bus of children.
Notably, the story began in the here and now. The terrifying surrealist bus drive is framed by talk at a bar, community members telling tales of the blizzard many years ago. We learn that Vivek, the farmer/school-bus driver, survived to tell his family about the ordeal. The framing continues when we are told that he committed the story to paper shortly after the blizzard. So we have multiple attempts by the story to not only root the subsequent bus-trip-in-the-snow story in fact but also to assure us that the key participants lived to tell the tale.
I’m not sure I can recall another story that does this thing.
Everything is OK; they made it; and talked about for years afterward!
Followed by: surrealist, underwater, drowning death and hollow children.
What to make of it? I’m not sure.
If truth is a happy ending, that’s nice. But if you had to lose yourself in hell – even if it was temporary or even imagined – is it really a happy ending?
And that’s quite a trick on Erdrich’s part.
The selection:
Ivek heard the sounds of negotiation and discussion, voices kept low. He was in a cold sweat because, after a long stretch of flat surface, which he’d thought was possibly the Meridian Road, the bus was bumping over hummocks that didn’t feel like snow. For some reason, he imagined that it was a graveyard, although of course that was absurd. But then he felt a terrible slickness beneath the wheels. The bus skidded and his heart dropped. He was either farther south or farther west than he’d thought. They hadn’t gone down a steep riverbank, so he understood that they were on one of the arms of the deep lake that curved intimately below Tabor. And now, though he knew that it was unlikely in the extreme, his blighted mind reviewed the recent stretch of mild days and seized on the vision of the bus plunging to the bottom. He knew that the ice should still be sound throughout the lake, yet his unruly thoughts continued.
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