Love Medicine Louise Erdrich - Marvin Magalaner (essay date 1989)
Marvin Magalaner (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: Magalaner, Marvin. “Louise Erdrich: Of Cars, Time, and the River.” In American Woman Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman, pp. 95-108. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989.
[In the following essay, Magalaner maintains that Erdrich's primary focus in Love Medicine is on her characters and their relationships within the Turtle Mountain community.]
Love Medicine marks a new approach to the treatment of the American Indian in fiction. Louise Erdrich's Chippewa families on a twentieth-century reservation in the West bear no resemblance to the solemn “braves and squaws” of cowboy and Indian days. There's not a horse in the novel, not a peace pipe, and only a brief reference to nonfunctioning tribal gods. Where there is religion, it is Catholic; where there is hunting, it is by white police seeking Indian escapees from prison;...
[The entire page is 6088 words long]
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