The Stuff of Great Fiction

LOVE MEDICINE by Louise Erdrich '76 Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984, 272pp.

To bring magic to the wind-swept plains and hard wheat fields of North Dakota is of itself a neat trick; to people that land with characters who bristle with a wiry, loving life fulfills the most hopeful promise. Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich's remarkable first novel, is a powerful work, accomplished in both writing and design.

Reviewers in The New York Times Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post have given the book unusually high marks. Most recently, the National Book Critics named LoveMedicine the best new work of fiction in 1984. Jane Fonda has called to inquire about the movie rights, while Erdrich and her husband/editor/confidante, Professor Michael Dorris, who teaches anthropology at Dartmouth, recently lunched with Philip Roth and Clare Bloom. The book, as they say in the trade, is a hot property.

Such lofty attention is well-earned. Erdrich has shown a rare discipline and economy in her writing that stems from knowing precisely which word to put down next. Consider this confession of Nector Kashpaw, swimming in a lake in the middle of a dark cold night, turning over in his mind the consequences of infidelity.

I swam until I felt a clean tug in my soul to go home and forget about Lulu. 1 told myself that I had seen her for the last time that night. I gave her up and dived down to the bottom of the lake where it was cold, dark, still, like the pit of a grave. Perhaps I should have stayed there and never fought. Perhaps I should have taken a breath. But I didn't. The water bounced me back up. I had to get back into the thick of my life.

This sort of luminous prose shines throughout Love Medicine, forcing each of its memorable characters to bounce up to the thick of their own lives. Erdrich's writing reveals her mastery of the rhythms of poetry, a talent she began to develop as an undergraduate. The mature skill she brings to Love Medicine is startling in its clarity, and signals the emergence of a new American voice.

The book centers on the character June Kashpaw, a "long-legged Chippewa woman, aged hard in every way except how she moved." June dies walking home in a blizzard, her funeral bringing together a melange of friends and relatives who provide the living pulse of Love Medicine. There are the Morrisseys and the Lazarres, the Lamartines, and the Johnsons, all living out their lives against the bleak backdrop of a North Dakota Indian reservation.

Here we find drunkenness and despair, people, quietly enraged because there seems no other way for them to go. Life on the reservation holds little promise for much joy of any variety, but Erdrich's characters positively vibrate with life, giving and taking of it with such gusto and feeling that each trouble seems lessened, each failure easier to overcome. It is entirely to Erdrich's credit that she goes well beyond a social statement about Indian life in America and carries the reader instead to a rich garden of human emotions. In short, Love Medicine is not so much an Indian book as it is a book about people who happen to be Indians.

Special mention must also be made of the manner in which Erdrich put her book together. There are 21 stories in all, including 16 first-person narratives by seven different characters. These stories go back and forth in time, spanning a 50-year period from 1934 to 1984. Along the way, the reader is treated to a wonderfully intricate lacing of each character's life in a bubbling alchemy of opinions and viewpoints that suggest the interdependence the characters share with one another. It is this pageant of individual hopes and achievements within generations of family and friends that is the real beauty of Love Medicine.

With this first novel, Louise Erdrich has carved a solid niche from which to launch a soaring career, testing the high winds that few writers approach. Make no mistake: Love Medicine is the stuff of which great fiction is made.

Young Dawkins, Associate Director of Capital Giving at Dartmouth, is the author of Moonshadows: The Search for a Legend.