Tracks is Louise Erdrich's third novel of rural North Dakota. Love Medicine (1984) delineated a frayed line of Chippewa Indian lives in contemporary America. The Beet Queen (1986) portrayed a braid of their struggling, non-Indian neighbors of a generation or two ago. Both books were hung together by lyrical threads that highlighted and augmented the bleak and painful stuff of the stories wherein the lives of these peoples were intertwined. Both were masterworks.

Tracks brings the reader back to the early years of this century, 1912–1924, and it ties a knot of narrative around the previous novels. The style maintains the densely spiritual quality of her earlier work, resembling in some ways the "magical realism" of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and reveals some important history of the characters who people this rural world Ms. Erdrich is creating, or unraveling, before our eyes.

The narrative technique reveals the structure of the plot that in itself means to set forward the oppositional strands of twentieth-century Chippewa existence. Old Nanapush narrates half the chapters. Old Nanapush, named for the trickster-transformer of aboriginal Chippewa myth, upholder of the ancient, living traditions: the medicines, the hunting and trapping acumen, the land-related ethos, the familiar world view. Some might call him a liar like his namesake, but his lies and truths are tied and committed to ways that have served and survived the centuries' generations.

Pauline's chapters alternate with those of Nanapush. She is a half-breed. She lives for a time in the grubby Anglo town of Argus, away from the reservation. She returns, engages in lovemaking and love magic, receives or imagines a vision of the Virgin, gives birth, joins the convent, skins off her Indian ancestry, practices intense self-abnegation, and wages warfare against the Indian pagans who were formerly her associates, allies, and protectors. She, too, is called a liar; her lies and truths are tied and committed to a baroque and austere mission-house Catholicism.

Nanapush and Pauline engage in alternating narrative combat—his lies, her lies—as the white world inserts its roads into Indian lands, sinks its sawteeth into Indian timber, smothers Indian homes with layers of paper, and poisons Indian souls with printing ink. At the crux of this cultural biformity stands the Chippewa witch, Fleur, the mother of an auditor to whom Nanapush tells his version of the truth. Fleur stands against both worlds, Indian and white, cursing them each in turn, and working fabulous revenge when her times come. She gets no chance at narration, but her vision—as reported by the narrators (and the author)—disallows any romanticizing of either side.

A jaded reader might view the novel as yet another bipolarization of the age-old fight between whites and Indians, a dividing up of the North Dakota landscape into predictable factions. A reviewer might find some of the prose over-wrought, and the two narrative voices indistinguishable in their cadences. A materialist might find the flights of Ms. Erdrich's fable too fantastic for suspension of disbelief. Yet readers will appreciate and applaud the vigor and inventiveness of the author in accurately displaying the passions and obsessions of these two opposing views of the world: Indian and white. Louise Erdrich is a Chippewa-German-American, and the world she is describing does more than resemble or evoke the environment and people in and around Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, where she grew up; it embodies it and brings it to life.