Zelda and Aurelia (Albertine’s gossipy mother and aunt), Nector Kashpaw (Albertine’s senile grandfather), and Gordon Kashpaw (the husband whom June left, a hapless drunk). Worst of all is June’s legitimate son King, a volatile bully. King’s horrifying acts of violence—abusing his wife Lynette, battering his new car, and smashing the pies prepared for the family dinner—leave Albertine in dismay with a family in shambles.

Love Medicine then shifts back in time from 1981, and its thirteen remaining stories proceed in chronological order from 1934 to 1984. “Saint Marie” concerns a mixed-blood girl, Marie Lazarre, who in 1934 enters Sacred Heart Convent and embarks on a violent love-hate relationship with Sister Leopolda. In “Wild Geese,” also set in 1934, Nector Kashpaw is infatuated with Lulu Nanapush, but his affections swerve unexpectedly when he encounters Marie Lazarre on the road outside her convent. By 1948, the time of “The Beads,” Marie has married Nector, had three children (Aurelia, Zelda, and Gordie), and agreed to rear her niece June. Nector, however, is drinking and philandering, and June, after almost committing suicide in a children’s hanging game, leaves to be brought up by Eli in the woods. “Lulu’s Boys,” set in 1957, reveals that the amorous Lulu Lamartine (née Nanapush) had married Henry Lamartine but bore eight sons by different fathers. Meanwhile, in “The Plunge of the Brave,” also set in 1957, Nector recalls the development of his five-year affair with Lulu and tries to leave his wife Marie for her, but the result is that he accidentally burns Lulu’s house to the ground.

The offspring of these Kashpaws and Lamartines also have their problems in later Love Medicine stories. In “A Bridge,” set in 1973, Albertine runs away from home and becomes the lover of Henry Lamartine, Jr., one of Lulu’s sons, a troubled Vietnam War veteran.“The Red Convertible,” set in 1974, also involves Henry, Jr., as Lyman Lamartine tries unsuccessfully to bring his brother out of the dark personality changes that his time in Vietnam has wrought in him. On a lighter note, “Scales,” set in 1980, is a hilarious account of the romance between Dot Adare, an obese clerk at a truck weighing station, and Gerry Nanapush, one of Lulu’s sons who is a most unusual convict: enormously fat, amazingly expert at escaping from jail, but totally inept at avoiding capture. “Crown of Thorns,” which overlaps with the time of “The World’s Greatest Fishermen” in 1981, traces the harrowing and bizarre decline of Gordie Kashpaw into alcoholism after June’s death.

Though in these earlier Love Medicine stories the positive powers of love and spirit are more often frustrated than fulfilled, in the last three stories several characters achieve breakthroughs that bring members of the different families together in moving and hopeful ways. In “Love Medicine,” set in 1982, Lipsha Morrissey reaches out lovingly to his grandmother Marie and to the ghosts of Nector and June. In “The Good Tears,” set in 1983, Lulu undergoes a serious eye operation and is cared for by Marie, who forgives her for being Nector’s longtime extramarital lover. Finally, in “Crossing the Water,” set in 1984, Lipsha helps his father, Gerry Nanapush, escape to Canada and comes to appreciate the rich heritage of love, spirit, and wiliness that he has inherited from his diverse patchwork of Ojibwa relatives—especially from his grandmother Lulu, his great-aunt Marie, and his parents, June and Gerry.

The Beet Queen

In The Beet Queen, her second novel, Erdrich shifts her main focus from the American Indian to the European-immigrant side of her background, and she creates in impressive detail the mythical town of Argus (modeled on Wahpeton, where she was reared, but located closer to the Ojibwa reservation) in the years 1932-1972. The opening scene of The Beet Queen, “The Branch,” dramatizes two contrasting approaches to life that many characters will enact throughout the novel. On a cold spring day in 1932, two orphans, Mary and Karl Adare, arrive by freight train in Argus. As they seek the way to the butcher shop owned by their Aunt Fritzie and Uncle Pete Kozka, Mary “trudge[s] solidly forward” while Karl stops to embrace a tree that already has its spring blossoms. When they are attacked by a dog, Mary runs ahead, continuing her search for the butcher shop, while Karl runs back to hop the train once again. As the archetypal plodder of the novel, Mary continues to “trudge solidly forward” throughout; she is careful, determined, and self-reliant in pursuit of her goals. On the other hand, Karl is the principal dreamer—impressionable, prone to escapist impulses, and dependent on others to catch him when he falls.

The Adare family history shows how Karl is following a pattern set by his mother, Adelaide, while Mary grows in reaction against this pattern. Like Karl, Adelaide is physically beautiful but self-indulgent and impulsive. Driven to desperation by her hard luck in the early years of the Great Depression, Adelaide startles a fairground crowd by abandoning her three children (Mary, Karl, and an unnamed newborn son) to fly away with the Great Omar, an airplane stunt pilot.

In Argus, Mary tangles with yet another beautiful, self-centered dreamer: her cousin Sita Kozka, who resents the attention that her parents, Pete and Fritzie, and her best friend, the mixed-blood Celestine James, pay to Mary. Mary prevails, however, and carves a solid niche for herself among Pete, Fritzie, and Celestine, who, like Mary, believe in a strong work ethic and lack Sita’s pretentious airs.

A number of episodes gratify the reader with triumphs for Mary and comeuppances for the less sympathetic characters Karl, Adelaide, and Sita. Mary becomes famous for a miracle at her school (she falls and cracks the ice in the image of Jesus), gains Celestine as a close friend, and in time becomes manager of the Kozka butcher shop. By contrast, Karl becomes a drifter who finds only sordid momentary pleasure in his numerous affairs. Meanwhile, Adelaide marries Omar and settles in Florida, but she becomes moody and subject to violent rages. Similarly, Sita fails in her vainglorious attempts to become a model and to establish a fashionable French restaurant; she escapes her first marriage through divorce and becomes insane and suicidal during her second.

Even as Erdrich charts the strange and sometimes grotesque downfalls of her flighty characters, however, she develops her more sympathetic ones in ways that suggest that the opposite approach to life does not guarantee happiness either. Mary is unsuccessful in her attempt to attract Russell Kashpaw (the half brother of Celestine), and she develops into an exotically dressed eccentric who is obsessed with predicting the future and controlling others. Like Mary, Celestine James and Wallace Pfef are hardworking and successful in business, but their loneliness drives each of them to an ill-advised affair with Karl, and he causes each of them considerable grief. In addition, the union of Celestine and Karl results in the birth of Dot Adare (who grows up to be the ill-tempered lover of Gerry Nanapush in the Love Medicine story “Scales”); since Celestine, Mary, and Wallace all spoil the child, Dot turns out, in Wallace’s words, to have “all of her family’s worst qualities.” As a teenager, Dot herself comes to grief when she is mortified to learn that the well-meaning Wallace has rigged the election for queen of the Argus Beet Festival so that she, an unpopular and ludicrously unlikely candidate, will win.

In addition to the defeats and disappointments that all the characters bear, Erdrich dramatizes the joy that they derive from life. The compensations of family and friendship—ephemeral and vulnerable as these may be—prove to be significant for all the characters at various times in the story, particularly at the end. The irrepressible vitality of these people, troublesome as they often are to one another, keeps the reader involved and entertained throughout the novel.

Tracks

Erdrich’s third novel, Tracks, is concentrated, intense, and mystical. It is shorter than the previous novels, covering a time span of only twelve years and alternating between only two first-person narrators. This compression serves the story well, for the human stakes are high. At first, and periodically throughout the novel, the Ojibwa characters fear for their very survival, as smallpox, tuberculosis, severe winters, starvation, and feuds with mixed-blood families bring them close to extinction. Later in the novel, government taxes and political chicanery threaten the Ojibwas’ ownership of family and tribal land. In response, Erdrich’s Ojibwa characters use all the powers at their command—including the traditional mystical powers of the old ways—to try to survive and maintain their control over the land.

Nanapush, one of the novel’s two narrators, is an old Ojibwa whom Erdrich names for the trickster rabbit in tribal mythology who repeatedly delivers the people from threatening monsters. In Tracks, Erdrich’s Nanapush often does credit to his mythological model, Nanabozho, by wielding the trickster rabbit’s powers of deliverance, wiliness, and humor. He saves Fleur Pillager, a seventeen-year-old girl who is the last but one of the Pillager clan, from starvation. Later he delivers young Eli Kashpaw from the sufferings of love by advising him how to win Fleur’s heart. Also, Nanapush is instrumental in saving the extended family that forms around Fleur, Eli, and himself. This family grows to five when Fleur gives birth to a daughter, Lulu, and Eli’s mother, Margaret Kashpaw, becomes Nanapush’s bedmate. As these five come close to starvation, Nanapush sends Eli out to hunt an elk; in one of the most extraordinary passages of the novel, Nanapush summons a power vision of Eli hunting that the old man imagines is guiding Eli to the kill. Nanapush also demonstrates the humor associated with his mythological model in his wry tone as a narrator, his sharp wit in conversation, and the tricks that he plays on his family’s mixed-blood antagonists, the Morrisseys and the Lazarres.

Foremost among these antagonists is the novel’s other narrator, Pauline Puyat. A “skinny big-nosed girl with staring eyes,” Pauline circulates in Argus from the Kozkas’ butcher shop to the Sacred Heart Convent, and on the reservation from the Nanapush-Pillager-Kashpaw group to the Morrissey and Lazarre clans. At first attracted to Fleur by the beauty and sexual power that she herself lacks, Pauline later takes an envious revenge by concocting a love potion that seems to drive Fleur’s husband, Eli, and Sophie Morrissey to become lovers. Ironically, though one side of her believes in a Catholic denial of her body, Pauline later gives birth out of wedlock to a girl named Marie, and at the end of her narrative Pauline enters the convent to become Sister LeopoldA&Mdash;the cruel nun who later torments her own daughter, Marie Lazarre, in Love Medicine.

Though Erdrich clearly feels passionately about the sufferings visited on her Ojibwa characters in Tracks, she treats this politically charged material with her usual disciplined restraint. Her dispassionate, deadpan use of first-person narrators (never broken by authorial commentary) matches the understated, stoic attitude that Nanapush adopts toward the numerous waves of hardship and betrayal that the Ojibwas must endure.

If in some ways Tracks seems to conclude with a feeling of fragmentation and defeat, in other ways it strikes positive notes of solidarity and survival, especially when considered in relation to Love Medicine and The Beet Queen. Fleur disappears, leaving her husband and daughter, but Nanapush uses his wiliness to become tribal chairman and then to retrieve Lulu from a distant boarding school. At the end, the reader is reminded that Nanapush has addressed his entire narrative to Lulu: The old man hopes that his story will convince Lulu to embrace the memory of Fleur, “the one you will not call mother.” Further, the reader familiar with Love Medicine will realize how this young girl, who becomes Lulu Lamartine, carries on the supernaturally powerful sexuality of her mother Fleur and the wily talent for survival of Nanapush, the old man who gave her his name and reared her.

The Bingo Palace

The Bingo Palace takes place roughly ten years after the end of Love Medicine and follows several characters introduced in Erdrich’s first three novels. Primary among these is June Kashpaw’s luckless son Lipsha Morrissey, back on the reservation after a series of failed jobs. His uncle, shrewd businessman Lyman Lamartine, offers Lipsha a job at his bingo parlor as a part-time bartender and night watchman. After his dead mother June appears with bingo tickets that are destined to change his luck significantly, gentle Lipsha not only wins a prize van but also pockets more of Lyman’s money by continuing to win. A further complication in their relationship is Shawnee Ray Toose (Miss Little Shell), champion jingle-dress dancer, with whom Lipsha is promptly smitten, even though she has had a son by Lyman.

This loosely structured novel recounts Lipsha’s sweet but faltering courtship of Shawnee, who rebuffs both of her suitors; Lyman’s schemes to erect a splendid bingo palace on the last bit of Pillager land; and a joint vision quest that is serious for Lyman but comic for Lipsha, whose vision animal turns out to be a skunk that really sprays him. Lipsha has another abortive reunion with his father, escaped convict Gerry Nanapush, and is left stranded in a stolen car in a blizzard until his great-grandmother Fleur Pillager steps in. Erdrich employs techniques of Magical Realism as the dead speak and the lake monster Misshepeshu continues to strike terror into the hearts of all except the dauntless Fleur.

The Antelope Wife

Erdrich’s seventh novel, The Antelope Wife, shifts to a new set of characters and a new locale, Minnesota. A young cavalry private, Scranton Roy, is sent to quell an American Indian uprising but mistakenly attacks a neutral Ojibwa village. Realizing his error, he manages to rescue a baby whom he then nurses with his own miraculous milk and raises to adulthood. In this way the white Roy family begins a relationship that spans five generations with two Ojibwa families.

The infant’s grieving mother marries a man named Showano and bears twin girls. Her twin granddaughters Zosie and Mary Showano figure prominently as the wife and the lover of Scranton Roy’s grandson and as the two mothers of Rozina Roy Whiteheart Beads, herself the mother of twin daughters. Rozina wants to leave her husband Richard for a Minneapolis baker, Frank Showano. Although this novel was completed just before Michael Dorris’s death, it is uncomfortably prescient in its account of the unhappy marriage between Rozina and her suicidal husband.

This is a novel of repeated family patterns (lost mothers, lost daughters), emphasized by the linking imagery of the archetypal beaders that introduce each section. In this subtle and seamless blending of Ojibwa myth with contemporary life, Magical Realism becomes even more pronounced. Frank Showano’s brother Klaus is nearly destroyed by his infatuation with a seductive, shape-shifting antelope woman. The windigo, a cannibal hunger spirit, is a very real presence and threat, and some chapters are narrated by a talking dog named Almost Soup. The Antelope Wife affirms the vitality of Ojibwa culture on and off the reservation.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Erdrich’s darkly comic eighth novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, revisits several of the characters from earlier books, particularly Father Damien Modeste, the mild old priest at Little No Horse reservation in North Dakota. Erratically spanning the years from 1910 to 1996, this book offers an account of his unusual history, including the revelation that he is not only a woman, Agnes DeWitt, but a former nun and farm wife to whom a piano, even a simple Chopin nocturne, presents an occasion of sin. Swept in by the flooding Red River, he arrives on the reservation to assume the identity of a recently drowned priest and begin a life of service. As Father Damien, he enjoys a deepening friendship with the Ojibwa elders Kashpaw and Nanapush as well as with their extended families. He also endures the unwelcome visit of a foul black dog that thrusts its paw into his soup, bargains for his soul, and presents him with an irresistible temptation.

A second story line involves an initial inquiry into purported miracles that were worked by the late Sister Leopolda (formerly Pauline Puyat), as the first step toward her possible canonization. Enigmatic Leopolda, skeletal and bone-white, appears only briefly as a figure from the past, although her memory looms large in the present. Prior to entering the novitiate, Pauline had tirelessly attended the sick and dying during the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918. On the reservation, people still recall stories of her stigmata, the imprints of Christ’s wounds on her body, and a mysterious paralysis that caused her to fold like a jackknife. As the nun’s only surviving contemporary, Father Damien supposedly knows the real truth about her and has been writing desperate, unanswered letters to the Vatican ever since his arrival.

At last the Vatican sends Father Jude Miller to investigate. Eager to discover a new saint, Father Jude embarks on a series of interviews with various residents who offer guarded recollections of Sister Leopolda. Father Damien, on the other hand, has developed serious misgivings about the nun’s sanctity and harbors no illusions about his own. His hard-earned wisdom leads him to a question that Erdrich has implied before: He fears that all his good intentions have been futile, that the government schools and forced conversion of the Ojibwas to Christianity have been horrible mistakes, offering the people little more than a destructive, alcohol-soaked alternative to their own culture.

Erdrich’s books are seldom predictable, but life at Little No Horse offers more surprises than most with its splendid procession of mystery, mysticism, gravity, and humor. The hilarious account of Nanapush’s death at the mercy of a runaway moose (and his subsequent resurrection) is one of the highlights of the novel.

The Plague of Doves

Erdrich returns to the familiar plains of North Dakota for The Plague of Doves, but, as in The Antelope Wife, with completely new characters whose lives are intertwined. This time her setting is near Argus, in the fictional town of Pluto, whose sparse population consists of Germans, Norwegians, and Ojibwas from the neighboring reservation. The present is filled with dizzying relationships, interspersed with tales from the past that reveal the origins and history of the community.

The novel opens in 1911, immediately after the horrific slaughter of a whole family, save for an infant, then shifts back fifteen years to the time when a sudden plague occurred. Invading doves blackened the skies like locusts and settled over the land, devouring everything. In desperation, people attempted to drive them away, while the local Catholic priest organized a procession of the mixed-blood population to pray for deliverance. During this event a young altar boy, Seraph Milk, took advantage of the confusion to run off with his future wife, to become the progenitor of the Milk-Harp family around which the story centers.

In this novel, Erdrich employs three main narrators as well as several minor ones. The first is Evelina (Evey) Harp, the granddaughter of Seraph Milk, who is now called Mooshum (Grandfather). Evey reveals her childhood crushes on a mischievous classmate, Corwin Peace, and on her sixth-grade teacher, whom the children call Sister Godzilla. Later, Evey becomes a psychiatric aide in the state mental hospital, eventually signing herself in as a patient after a bad experience with some LSD that Corwin has given her. (In an Erdrich novel, at least one character is always slightly mad.) Other narrators include a judge whose grandfather, as a member of an ill-fated surveying party, had a hand in the founding of Pluto, and a naïve teenager who marries Corwin’s charismatic uncle, an evangelist who founds a dangerous cult.

Mooshum is another of Erdrich’s delightfully roguish old men, as is his crippled brother Shamengwa, who plays a magical violin in spite of his damaged arm. The two elders relish teasing Mooshum’s daughter by sneaking forbidden whiskey past her, which they manage whenever an unpopular priest, Father Cassidy, comes calling in another attempt to save their souls. Because Shamengwa long ago left the Catholic Church to return to traditional beliefs, any hope of his conversion is doomed, but Mooshum enjoys sparring with the frustrated priest.

One of the tales that Mooshum relates to Evey is a shameful secret widely known in the community yet seldom repeated—the story of an Ojibwa youth who was a distant relative. Dying from tuberculosis, the boy’s pious mother nailed wooden crosses to her son’s boot soles to protect him from the disease, so that his footprints revealed crosses, a holy track, which then became his nickname. Holy Track, whom Erdrich modeled on a historical figure of the same name, was one of four innocent Ojibwas hanged by an angry mob of Pluto’s white citizens, believing that the men were responsible for murdering the baby’s family.

Like most of Erdrich’s work, this is a story of connections, mixing regional and human history with fiction and elements of the supernatural. Descendants of the lynch mob and of their victims now live side by side in Pluto. Erdrich exposes the underlying wounds between Ojibwas and whites that still remain, but silence helps to preserve the amenities of everyday living, and even reconciliation, in a town where some secrets are not spoken yet are shared by all.

If Louise Erdrich had been born two hundred years earlier, she might have become a traditional Ojibwa storyteller, whose tales would have reminded her listeners of their unchanging relationship to the land and to the mythic and legendary characters who inhabited it. Several generations removed from such a stable and undamaged culture, Erdrich nevertheless has been able to create a richly neotribal view of people and place. Her novels testify to the profound interrelatedness of her characters—Native American and white, contemporaries and ancestors—both with one another and with their midwestern homeland.