Book Review: The Butterflies of Grand Canyon: A Novel by Margaret Erhart

Love, whether for a place or a person, is a tricky thing to catch, pin, and label. Butterflies, darting on shifting, patterned wings, fall more readily into the net of order. In The Butterflies of Grand Canyon, Margaret Erhart layers the mysteries inherent to relationships beneath the canopy of a murder-mystery. Erhart’s sensitive descriptions produce a vivid sense of location, transporting the reader to the Arizona of the early 1950s. In Jane Merkle, Erhart gives us the perfect tour guide for this alien landscape.

A young woman, married to an older man in an era in which a wife was the natural extension of the husband, Mrs. Morris Merkle initially presents as a dutiful, if disinterested, spouse. Watching Jane on the platform at the train station where she and her husband have arrived for a visit with his sister, Dotty Hedquist, and brother-in-law Oliver, one feels that Jane has been tagged and transported, much like her inexplicably missing footlocker. Although she finds herself left with “what she’s wearing and the contents of her purse,” we hear no murmurs of complaint directly from Jane.

It is not until Jane reaches the edge of the Grand Canyon that we first begin to sense glimmerings of individuality and curiosity. When Jane expresses disappointment at the “great nothing” before her in the dark of the moonless night, Oliver tells her to listen.

She listened. She struggled and strained to listen, and heard nothing. “I’m afraid I don’t hear a thing.”
“But you do,” he encouraged her. “You’ve never thought of it as sound. You’ve thought of it as the absence of sound. It’s that ringing.”
She prayed to hear something ring. She wanted to please the old man. And just as she had given up and was about to lie – by saying, “Yes, of course. That ringing,” she did hear it. How extraordinary. As loud as a swarm of mosquitoes, but set in a higher octave, and continuous. One continuous, clear, high-pitched silver ringing. The sound of the Grand Canyon. She laughed, and he did too. He placed his hand on her elbow, turning her in the dark, and without another word, they walked back to the car.

Hints of dissatisfaction with her lot appear early in Jane’s passages. Erhart refers repeatedly to her protagonist as Jane Merkle, emphasizing the possession by a husband. One gleans, at the outset, the sense that Jane’s marriage is not one of passion, as Erhart describes Jane’s first night “in the Hedquists’ home, in the bed she must share with her husband…” Though the Arizona landscape and Western culture are completely foreign to a young woman whose motto is “When in Rome remember you’re from St. Louis,” we learn that Jane has decided to stay on with the Hedquists for a visit even after Morris returns home.

Article Author: Christy Corp-Minamiji

Christy Corp-Minamiji is a livestock veterinarian, writer, and mother living in Northern California. She writes fiction and blogs on the eclectic range of topics that interest her.

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