Paper Trail: Essays.

• Author: Tangum, Marion M.

"Sava had all the tools assembled. I brushed aside his dark hair and held his left lobe between two slivers of ice. His skin was soft to the touch, a pale tan. His ear was so familiar, so cherished, that I could have picked it out of a lineup."

This passage, which describes Michael Dorris' feelings as he obliges his son's request that he pierce the boy's ear, is typical of the exquisitely intimate voice of the author throughout his essays in Paper Trail. Much of the collection tells the story of Dorris, his wife, Louise Erdrich, and their six children, of whom the adopted three all succumbed as teenagers to the tragedies of fetal alcohol syndrome. These essays are sad, and angry in spots, but they are filled with Dorris' sense of humor and feeling for other people--expressed in his richly entertaining concrete-image style.

The essays roam through Dorris' experiences, from growing up with his mother and Aunt Marion (who taught him to pitch a ball, drive a stick shift, and "to the tune of 'You, You, You,' counted my laps in the Crescent Hill Pool" as Dorris practiced for a lifesaving certificate); to adopting three babies and raising them as a single parent; to suffering with each of them the torments of their doom from birth; to living and writing with Erdrich in such a way that family and work were inseparable: "When you're typing with one hand while aiming a bottle of juice at an open mouth with the other, you take your inspiration where you find it."

Dorris' ability to extend his personal experiences to an understanding of others is evident throughout the collection. Having grown up without a father, for example, he had his own "take" on the ravages of the Vietnam War: "'Glory' is an inadequate substitute, a pale abstraction, compared to the enduring, baffling blankness of a missing parent."

Much of the collection thoroughly documents the history of a myriad of cultures populating the Western Hemisphere before the arrival of western Europeans. One of the most interesting discussions is Dorris' presentation of the severe limitations built into a university's...