Louise Erdrich's mixed German-American, French, and Ojibwe Indian heritage finds a home in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota, an arid scrap of Great Plains prairie that fends off the elements, both ethnic and meteorological, with a rough-hewn, eccentric sense of community. Many of her eight novels focus on reservation life, which may explain why The Master Butchers Singing Club, a sprawling and impossibly ambitious examination of German-American identity, labors so hard to catch up. Covering the decades between and after the world wars, the book expands from the simple story of a German butcher and his family staking their claim in the West to a wider-reaching look at Argus and its inhabitants, and the often-tragic rift between new Americans and the Old Country. Before Erdrich immerses herself in a thorny mass of colorful characters and melodramatic plot twists, she introduces the central players with a masterful economy and narrative force that's regrettably absent from the rest of the novel. In a breathless 13-page chapter, she whisks strapping young Fidelis Waldvogel from the killing grounds of the Great War to his future home in North Dakota, the farthest destination he can reach on his meager savings and a suitcase full of sausages. But first, he has a shotgun wedding with his best friend's pregnant widow Eva, a steadfast and honorable woman who accepts him at a glance. Coming to Argus with little more than 35 cents and a collection of butcher knives, he settles into the community, opens Waldvogel Meats on the money from odd jobs and bank loans, and even hosts a backroom singing club devoted to traditional German songs. But Fidelis' story gets nudged to the sidelines once Delphine Watzka, Erdrich's real heroine, enters the scene. The daughter of a raging drunk and a mother of unknown origin, Delphine returns home to Argus after a successful stint as half of a vaudeville act. Her ambiguous yet powerful emotional connection to her performing partner is tested when they find her father presiding obliviously over a home with three corpses rotting in the cellar. The mysteries of their deaths and Delphine's mother's identity hang over the book, but they only scratch the surface of a narrative that expands beyond Erdrich's grasp, as major characters recede from view and minor players assert themselves unexpectedly. Once Delphine enters the Waldvogel family, the strong allegiances and divisions between the characters give the book a soap-operatic quality that Erdrich encourages with overbaked prose. The kudzu plotting and thin characterizations–stern and dignified, yet soft-hearted, Delphine and Fidelis are virtually interchangeable–might have been solved by more focus and less ambition, but Erdrich never quite recaptures the effortless momentum of the first few chapters. Though packed with powerful emotional epiphanies, The Master Butchers Singing Club falls victim to hyperbole, swallowed by its own consuming passions.