“The Hollow Children”
by Louise Erdrich
from the November 28, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
If I were voting for the next Nobel Prize in Literature, my vote would go to Louise Erdrich. I think her books are fascinating, beautifully written, and vital. I’m so excited we have a new story from her this week. I wondered if it was an excerpt from a forthcoming novel, and the answer is: maybe. From the interview with Deborah Treisman, Treisman says that the story “may become part of a novel you’re working on. How does it connect with the rest of the book, if so?” Erdrich’s response? “I have no idea.” Ha!
“The Hollow Children” is very short, so I’ll definitely be getting to it today. From the interview, it appears to take place on a school bus caught in a severe blizzard in 1923. Here is the opening short section:
At the Tabor Bar, around beer No. 4, the men sometimes got into history farming, trading stories of their antecedents’ exploits and agonies. In the long ago, wheat prices had plunged and most of the bonanza farms had broken up. That was when their great-greats had bought the land. The men talked about old plagues, old equipment, old swaps of ownership, crops, land, and dire weather. John Pavlecky’s great-grandmother, at the age of nine, had survived the blizzard of 1923 by burrowing into a nearby haystack when the school bus didn’t show up. Diz remembered his grandfather telling stories about an Uncle Ivek, who had also endured that blizzard, which was particularly lethal because it happened on a misty and mild April day. Around eight that morning, the bus had been almost full of children and headed toward the school, when out of the northwest a wind of sixty miles per hour had dropped the temperature instantly to minus twenty and filled the air with a blistering-cold curtain of powder. Such a snow could blind your eyes and scour the features off your face.
Ivek was a farmer, a part-time schoolteacher, and one of the bus drivers. He was taking his turn behind the wheel. In the back of a school notebook, not long after the blizzard, he wrote about what happened.
Have a wonderful week! If you’re so inclined, please share your thoughts on the story or on Erdrich’s work in general below in the comments.
This is an excellent story turned from a little unusual into the almost totally unexpected and then back. In particular, I really liked how the hero was vulnerable that nothing was for sure and the worst could have happened or did and then didn’t. The tall tale aspect keeps it open as far as is it a true event or made up. Doesn’t matter because it’s an amazing realization no matter how or any which way it was arrived at.
I’ll hold off on commenting for the reason that I don’t have anything insightful to say, at least not yet. I’d like to point out though, that the story has uncanny thematic resemblances to the current story in Harpers! I would strongly advise everyone reading this to also read https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/on-a-winters-night-kate-dicamillo/
Terse and well-written. Hard not to think of Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter, given the subject matter. I wouldn’t say it feels slight, as I was engaged by the story-within-a-story component and the reflections on the past, although the recollection turning into a fantastical-thing-that-didn’t-actually-happen-contrasted-with-the-banal-reality was a bit of a disappointment. There’s a strong subtext here, though: Look at what people used to endure just to get to school in the past, and then look at how lazily and shoddily we treat education in contemporary America!
Sean H says “Hard not to think of Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter”. Not to hard for me — I managed not to think of it.
Could be shoddiness and laziness or just that higher ups in education bureaucracies are bored and don’t really care about what they are not doing versus everyone thinking they are doing a great job. Only good pr is important. A lot of short stories don’t really deal with kids altchildhoods. villain’s backstories explain bad childhoods which may be all the more reason that actual better teaching with more care and attention should be expended that so that kids get a better education and experience better childhoods.
Larry Bone is your December 2nd comment in relation to the story?
I can’t seem to make it make sense. Explain.
How did these comments on a short story turn into a diatribe on public education?