Cannonball #31: The Master Butchers Singing Club
by Caroline
Last time I complained about slogging through a dud, and the best way to cleanse the ol’ book palate is with a real barn-burner. In a pile of stuff on one of my shelves I found a book my mom lent me: The Master Butchers Singing Club. My mom reads more than anyone I know and she has great taste, so I take her recommendations seriously.
Few books summarize themselves in a few lines better than this one:
No matter what they might have heard at the lumberyard, [Delphine] wanted to give the impression of an extremely respectable woman [...] A plain person. Trustworthy. Not a person who had a murderer for a best friend or who’d lived with a vaudeville acrobat or who had a gabby old souse for a father. Delphine, she wanted people to say of her, she’s awfully quick, but she’s solid and reliable.
This is a book of one-way loves that sometimes meet and sometimes don’t. It is also a story of small-town life before, during, and after the Depression; during and after both World Wars; and for a few close families of outsiders. Erdrich writes from some of her experiences as the descendant of German immigrants to the midwest and of butchers and of vaudeville. Her writing is rich and articulate without seeming stuffy, and matches nicely with the almost Steinbecky setting of this book, the dusty, wheaty flats of North Dakota.
It also has shades of Carnivále, HBO’s groundbreaking and therefore short-lived show about a Depression-era traveling show. To watch a small town is like watching a close-knit group of travelers, because everyone is moving forward together and in inadvertent lockstep by necessity. When one store succeeds or fails it can take the town with it; a tragedy in one family can make ripples through everyone’s lives. It’s difficult to write about this closeness and the way it bears out without becoming melodramatic or even maudlin, and Erdrich really shocked me with her skill. She even brings in a VERY LAST SECOND SURPRISE and it is the most natural, moving, sensible closure I can imagine for the novel.
Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
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