The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Louise Erdrich Reads Karen Russell

September 1, 2024·1 hr 13 min·5 clips

Louise Erdrich says the brothers are haunted by guilt and a need to apologize to their dead sister Olivia.

A mattress ad comes first. Then the excerpt settles into fiction, with family discomfort, comic bodily detail, and an old grief that refuses to behave politely. Granana arrives without softness. She has lived through deprivation, war losses, and years of banana-heavy meals, and the narration treats that history as both explanation and accusation. Olivia's drawings start to look less like scribbles and more like evidence. Wallow studies the Glowworm Grotto sketch against a crab shack map, trying to place a hidden cave along the island shore. The kitchen tightens. Granana brushes off the mourning around Olivia with such coldness that Wallow nearly tips into open violence. Then memory does the useful thing. A tiny orange dot in the picture, easy to miss, helps Granana read the sunset as a directional clue. The western coves matter. What seemed childish or broken becomes a map, and the old woman's blunt recollection changes the boys' search. The humor stays uneasy. The scene blends grotesque family comedy with a sharper account of how loss gets remembered, minimized, inherited, and put to work. The closing returns to the magazine frame. Deborah Treisman gives the production credit, points listeners to other New Yorker podcasts, and ends in the magazine's measured house cadence. The fiction remains the center. The tension comes from Wallow's active grief meeting Granana's scarred refusal to make grief ceremonial.

As heard by us

A family search for Olivia's cave turns grief into something briny, blunt, funny, and unsettling.

Louise Erdrich's reading of Karen Russell lands in a family search that keeps swerving away from neat grief. Wallow and the narrator pore over Olivia's old drawings of the Glowworm Grotto, trying to match a child's marks to the island's shoreline, until Granana wanders in and…

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