LaRose

The Iron sisters are two sides of the same coin; both are very smart and play volleyball competitively. However, the sisters look entirely different: Snow has Landreaux’s warm brown eyes, and Josette has Emmaline’s fierce green eyes. “Snow was going to be the tall, intense one who had trouble concentrating on her schoolwork and whom boys only liked as a friend […] Josette was going to be the smart one who despaired about her weight but magnetized clumsy desire among boys whom she liked only as friends” (39). The two sisters rarely appear separate from one another within the novel, with the exception of the last section wherein Josette realizes and must confront her love for her adopted brother, Hollis. Previous to this, the girls exist as a unified front, revealing the sexism inherent within society that they both succumb to and work against. The Iron girls adhere to tradition and listen to the stories of the elders, especially their grandmother, although they also question the sexism inherent within some of these practices. They also adopt Maggie as a surrogate sister, giving her advice and listening to her problems, cementing the link LaRose begins between the Iron and the Ravich families. 

Landreaux is the father of the Iron family, although he is six years older than his wife, Emmaline. He has darker skin and warm brown eyes shared by Snow and LaRose. Landreaux is haunted by his past, especially his time in boarding school and the abuse that he presumably suffered at the hands of his alcoholic parents. As a result, Landreaux struggles with his own alcoholism and opioid dependency. Landreaux believes that he has a demon that follows him, ruining his life. He partially believes that this demon is responsible for Dusty’s murder, thinking that if he understands where the demon came from, he can cure it. More than anything, Landreaux believes himself to be of little worth. He comes to think that his decision to share LaRose might be the best thing he has ever accomplished. “He saw that he was supposed to share LaRose all along because the boy was too good for a no-good like him” (151). Landreaux’s character is marked by a lack of self-respect which triggers his substance dependencies. However, because he is a father, Landreaux hides this part of himself from his children so that they never know the depth of his depression. Landreaux self-sacrifices to the point that he prefers the idea of suicide to the grief of having to live with the fact that he killed Dusty. “He made fierce attempts to send himself back in time and die before he went into the woods. But each time he closed his eyes the boy was still ruined in the leaves” (9). Landreaux personifies the trauma and suffering that the author presents as an inherent part of life, demonstrating how this trauma comes from both external and internal sources. 

Maggie is the last biological child of the Raviches and the older sister of Dusty and subsequently LaRose. Pale with long brown hair, Maggie’s gold eyes turn black when she is angry, which happens frequently. After Dusty’s death, Peter notices that her laugh has changed. “She used to have a laugh like little bells […] Her laugh had become a jeer, a bark, a series of angry shouts, an outburst. She laughed now when things were sad, not funny” (46). As a young child when Dusty dies, Maggie cannot handle the trauma of his death, especially when she must offset her mother’s grief and suicidal tendencies. Maggie demonstrates how people change after trauma. Previously a fairly happy, young girl, she becomes hardened and more rebellious after her brother’s death. Maggie wants control over her life: Her mother’s fragility scares Maggie because she cannot control it, just as she could not prevent the Fearsome Four from sexually assaulting her (See Quote 12). Maggie feels burdened by her mother’s condition (See Quote 18) despite sharing similarities in their predilections toward the macabre (See Quote 11). Whereas Nola reacts to tragedy by inflicting violence upon herself, Maggie responds to Dusty’s death by inflicting violence upon other people, essentially becoming the opposite of her mother. 

Father Travis is the priest at the reservation’s Catholic church. An ex-marine who survived the Beirut 1983 barracks bombing, Father Travis is movie-star attractive in a kind of traumatic or broken fashion, as scars cover most of his body as mementos of war. “The thick scars roping up his neck, twisting down in random loops, marked him on the outside and ran inside him, too […] He wondered, as he did every day, how he could go on pretending to the people he loved” (7). Father Travis personifies the repressed trauma of war, as his body, which he mostly keeps covered, serves as a canvas for the wartime horrors. Father Travis finds manual work calming and runs martial arts classes for kids, always existing on the periphery of violence. Although Father Travis seems drawn to violence, he prides himself on controlling these tendencies. He runs AA meetings and often uses violence in order to motivate alcoholics, like Landreaux, to stay sober, always skirting the line between the spirituality of religion and a religion of violence. Unlike the vast majority of the other characters in the novel, Father Travis is white and often personifies the white gaze (See Quote 5). 

LaRose is the youngest of the Iron children and is the same age as his best friend and half-cousin, Dusty. LaRose has the same warm brown eyes of his father, Landreaux. Despite being the titular character, the author creates an aura of mystery around LaRose so that he is unknowable and somewhat intangible. He often speaks in questions, although he is characterized with an innate and traditional cultural knowledge. When his parents perform the ritual to give LaRose to the Raviches in exchange for Dusty’s death, “LaRose helped with all of this—he knew how to do things. He was Landreaux’s little man, his favorite child” (10). LaRose is the favorite child and only being able to heal some of the wounds caused by Dusty’s death. The author explicitly associates his name with healing (see Quote 24), especially the emotional healing of releasing others’ burdens (see Quote 18). His very name represents a kind of divinity (see Quote 8), and he is often conceptualized by other characters as a savior (see Quote 5). LaRose exists mostly within his relationships to other people throughout the novel, either those characters in the spiritual world or as a sidekick for some of the living characters, like Maggie. LaRose rarely appears by himself, demonstrating the necessity of the community, both past and present, to come together in order to heal from this tragedy.

Nola is the blonde half-sister of Emmaline, who both share the same cult leader father. Nola is beautiful, but in a way that is more Americanized than Emmaline. She shares Emmaline’s maternal inclinations, but in a distorted way; all of the seemingly moral aspects of Emmaline are twisted in Nola so that the two women become foils for each other. Whereas Emmaline rarely cries, instead accepting and placating the pain of others, Nola represents the physical manifestation of emotional pain. She cannot distance herself from the loss of her son and is unquestionably altered by it, receding into herself. When the Irons give Peter and Nola LaRose, Peter thinks about giving LaRose back immediately until he notices that Nola’s “face had broken open. All the softness was flowing out. And the greed too, a desperate grasping that leaned her windingly toward the child” (16). Whereas other characters depict Emmaline as selfless, Nola is an unconscionably selfish person, greedy in her desire for a maternal bond. She represents how motherhood can become problematic. Without LaRose, she is often described as dead; she only exists for LaRose. At Christmas before she tries to commit suicide, “the lead sinker in her chest was leaking molten lead into her veins, slowly stopping her circulation. Her feet and hands were bone cold. She shivered in layers of fleece” (58). Nola does not find comfort in her daughter, but rather only seems alive when LaRose is with her. The author acknowledges Nola’s predilections toward the macabre (See Quote 11), which ultimately culminate in her attempt to commit suicide. However, Maggie thwarts this by reminding Nola that she is Maggie’s mother, too. Nola becomes a conflicted character who is both imprisoned and freed by the maternal love she feels for her children.