Postmodern and even magical realist elements render this story not only a larger-than-life family memory but also an interrogation of how we come to know the past and the motives of others. As in many postmodern tales, the narrator is unreliable. She is herself playing detective and collaging together a picture of her mother from old tabloids and unreliably “breathless” news articles, as well as painting the entire tale over with her own fascination with Harry Avalon and her mother’s former life. The narrator is sure the latter was more glamorous than life as a mother in a “sagging farmhouse” in New Hampshire.

Erdrich has at times rejected the label magical realism, as when she told The Atlantic, “My work has never really seemed fantastical to me” (Bacon, Katie. “An Emissary of the Between-World: A Conversation with Louise Erdrich,” The Atlantic, January 2001). There are solid literary-historical reasons for rejecting the label too. Magical realism was a movement pioneered in Latin America, most notably by Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia and Jorge Borges in Argentina in the 1960s. This in turn influenced Chilean writer Isabel Allende and postmodern English-speaking authors like Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and Salman Rushdie.