Night Train: Stories

Wry glimpses of life on the grim northern plains anchor these 31 short pieces by YA novelist Erdrich (sister to Louise), covering decades. In ""Still Life with 'Marigolds' & the Blue Mumbled Earth,"" a 31-year-old mother contemplates the bleak November graveyard in her Minnesota town and arrives at 31 reasons to go on living. In ""Morphine""-one of the plethora of pieces here that take place on troubled Native American reservations-the narrator's dying, overly-medicated Auntie Grace defends JFK Jr. and Princess Diana as models of exemplary behavior, refusing to believe in any parallel between their ways and those of the wayward Indian youths she prays for. ""Hairy Buffalo"" takes its title from the hardcore drink the collegiate narrator is introduced to at a party, a drink that reduces its white and Indian partakers to the lowest common denominator. The title story's train takes Miss Garbo, a whiskey-swilling 19-year-old college dropout, through the state of North Dakota over Christmas vacation: she savors her solitariness and fledgling poet's sense of purpose. Legends, landscape, and a sense of having lived deeply converge in Erdrich's tactile prose.