New Yorker Fiction 2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
Russell Banks
Born March 28, 1940

Erdrich's Cat is Elusive

March 31, 2014, Louise Erdrich, “The Big Cat”: A nameless narrator, over time, marries two different women—one who snores and one who does not. ¶ As always, Erdrich’s story contains a bit of the mystical. The narrator and Elida, his first wife, spend a Christmas with her parents in a poorly insulated house, whose interior walls exude frost early in the morning. He tells his daughter the layers of frost are the snores of his wife and her sisters. Later, he divorces his first wife and marries Laurene, a rich woman who does not snore. Having sacrificed so much sleep early on, the narrator now takes afternoon naps to catch up. ¶ He has monthly meetings with Elida over their daughter’s issues. One day he kisses Elida, and they conduct an affair, then get back together and remarry. Of course, the narrator is faced with living with the snoring again. In the last scene, Elida’s snores now take on the “gurgling purr of a big cat digesting prey meat.” The narrator wakes, in a sweat, perhaps realizing that he may be the prey meat. Erdrich’s book, The Round House came out in 2012.
[The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.]

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD

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