“Shadow Tag”

Renowned author Louise Erdrich makes successful and unnerving departures from the tone of her previous novels in her latest, “Shadow Tag,” published by Harper. Using a faux diary as a weapon against her prying husband, Gil, as their marriage falls apart, Irene enters into a precarious world of deception and manipulation. “If you haven’t lived through this sad story yourself, you know someone who has. And of course it’s the plot of a library’s worth of domestic novels, but Erdrich distinguishes her own version in a variety of exquisite ways,” says the Washington Post. Gil and Irene are frequently engaged in violent exchanges, and fantasies of death are as recurrent as the couples’ episodes of drinking. Threads of the author’s own life with her former husband haunt the innards of the novel, and the work almost begs the comparison. “[W]e miss something if we approach this book simply as fiction,” writes the New York Times. “‘Shadow Tag’ is a portrait of an ‘iconic’ marriage on its way to dissolution. And Louise Erdrich has been in just such a marriage.” Dark and filled with the haunting shadows of truth, Erdrich’s novel speeds ahead, with the captivated reader not far behind.