New Yorker Fiction Review #281: "The Hollow Children" by Louise Erdrich

Review of the short story from the Nov. 28, 2022 issue of The New Yorker...

There's a lot going on in this (very) short story by Louise Erdrich but then, there always is with her fiction. Not that I'm an expert, by any means. I've read Love Medicine (1984) the novel that arguably put her on the map, and a few of her short stories here and there over the years. 

"The Hollow Children" is a real nail-biter even though it is sort of a "story within a story." A great deal of Louise Erdrich's "material" as a writer is the actual idea of narrative itself, of story; how it gets passed down from generation to generation, how it affects our lives in the here and now, and what these stories or narratives reveal to us about not only our ancestors but our current selves. 

In "The Hollow Children" a story comes to us from a group of old men sitting around a bar, about a bus driver who -- caught in a severe, sudden blizzard -- must keep his cool in order keep the bus moving and, despite not being able to see anything, keep the children safe. Why the bus driver could not just stop the bus is immaterial. The natural level of suspense in the story is increased bus driver's nearly heart-attack inducing hallucination about what will happen to the kids if he accidentally drives out over the barely-frozen lake. It's told so vividly that as a reader you almost can't tell if it's a hallucination or not, which is the hallmark of a good hallucination, right? And also the hallmark of a good piece of fiction.

Erdrich opens up the story by framing it as just another story told by the old salts, over beers, at their favorite bar, but doesn't really return to wrap-up these theme. Not really sure why she needed to frame it as a story within a story, if she was not going to return to that theme. But not everything needs an explanation in a piece of fiction.