[In the following essay, Sutton discusses the recurring image of the red convertible in Love Medicine.]

Literary critic Marvin Magalaner has stated that in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, “water is the all-pervasive symbolic link with the past […] and with the natural environment,” whereas “the unnatural present is epitomized by the automobile” (101). But in the chapter of Love Medicine entitled “The Red Convertible”—a chapter often anthologized separately as a short story—just the opposite is the case: The automobile is associated with a more natural state of affairs—farther in the past, whereas water is associated with unnatural times much closer to the present. The chapter is organized around its closing paragraph, in which a red convertible is swallowed up by the Red River. This closing image symbolically restates what has happened to Henry Lamartine, both individually and in his relationship with his brother, Lyman.

Throughout the chapter, Erdrich associates the red convertible with Henry's state of mind. The first time the convertible is mentioned, it is personified. Lyman, the story's narrator, says that when he and Henry first saw the car, it looked “really is if it was alive” (144). But the car isn't portrayed as having merely human traits; it is portrayed as having what at first are Henry's traits. Lyman emphasizes the peaceful quality of the convertible by stating that when he first saw the car, sitting “calm and gleaming,” he “thought of the word repose” (144). Similarly, Henry at first possesses a natural calm and repose. Lyman fondly recalls times when he and Henry “sat still for whole afternoons, never moving a muscle, just shifting our weight along the ground” (147).

But of course, automobiles are normally associated with movement rather than with repose. As Lyman says of the months after buying the red convertible, “We went places in that car, me and Henry. We took off driving the whole summer” (144). Thus, although the convertible retains its association with Henry's calm personality, it also becomes associated with the carefree bond between the two brothers. Not surprisingly, the brothers' life on the road partakes more of quiet, natural contentment than of Kerouac-style frenetic adventures. Although Lyman prefers not to “hang onto the details” of their travels, one of the few moments he describes in depth from that summer involves the brothers lying beneath willow trees, feeling “so comfortable […] and quiet,” and Henry “asleep with his arms thrown wide” (145).

Unfortunately, Henry loses his natural repose when he is sent to Vietnam, where he sees nine months of combat and spends another half year as a prisoner of war. At this point, Erdrich inverts her method of associating the car with Henry: Whereas the red convertible had earlier been portrayed in terms associated with humans, after his Vietnam experience, Henry is portrayed in motion-dominated terms ordinarily associated with automobiles. Lyman states that by the time Henry returned home the war was over in the minds of most Americans, “but for him it would keep on going” (147). One sign of Henry's ongoing internal war is that now he is “never comfortable sitting still anywhere but always up and moving around” (147). He can sit still only when watching television, and even then he sits as if trapped in an out-of-control car seconds before the crash: “He sat in his chair gripping the armrests with all his might, as if the chair itself was moving at a high speed and if he let go at all he would rocket forward and maybe crash right through the set” (148). The television so upsets him that once while watching, he bites through his lip until blood flows down his chin. In a striking sign of his new, unnatural state, Henry does not even notice the blood as he goes in to dinner, “even though every time he took a bite of his bread his blood fell onto it and he was eating his own blood mixed in with the food” (148).

Erdrich correlates Henry's emotional disrepair with the condition of the red convertible. Henry's mother argues against sending Henry to a hospital because “they don't fix them in those places” (149), as if she were describing a cut-rate garage. Meanwhile Lyman, who had meticulously maintained the red convertible during Henry's time in Vietnam, now methodically damages it, hoping that Henry will decide to repair the car and in doing so will begin to repair himself. Henry takes the bait, and for awhile it appears that he, too, is convertible, that both car and man can be salvaged. When Henry takes Lyman for a ride after weeks of working on the convertible, the car “hum[s] like a top,” and Henry's face appears to be “clear, more peaceful” (151-52).

But we sense that Henry's repairs are only superficial, a sense that is reinforced when he chooses the Red River as his destination, because the snow is melting with the springtime and “he want[s] to see the high water” (151). Henry has been associated with the color red throughout the story: He is an American Indian with “a nose big and sharp like a hatchet, like the nose on Red Tomahawk” (147); his psychological damage stems from his forced association with “reds”—the Communist Viet Cong; and earlier in the story he was portrayed eating his own blood. When he takes the red convertible to the Red River, now at high water, the mood is foreboding.

If the convertible has been associated with the earlier, peaceful Henry and with attempts to restore Henry's sense of repose, the river epitomizes Henry's more recent, unnaturally chaotic state. Like Henry, the water shows the effects of past abuses: Although the season is spring, the river is “choked with winter trash,” and the surface of the water looks “like an old […] scar” (152). The turbulence is already a frightening force, carrying not only smaller bits of “winter trash” but also “boards and other things in the current” (154). Moreover, the river is still absorbing the past, which will only increase the turbulence: “clumps of dirty snow here and there on the banks” (152) are about to melt into the river and push the waters still higher. Thus, the river is about to go completely out of control, as Lyman observes that “The water hadn't gone over the banks yet, but it would, you could tell. It was just at its limit […]” (152). Shortly after this, Lyman describes Henry's facial expression as breaking “like stones break all of a sudden when water boils up inside them” (152). Like the river, Henry has absorbed all he can take; the red waters within him are surging out of control.

Unable to bear it any longer, Henry leaps into the river. Overwhelmed by both the internal and the external current, he says, “My boots are filling.” And then Henry drowns (154). After trying one last time to save his brother, Lyman returns to the red convertible, puts on the high beams, drives it to the riverbank, and gets out. As the automobile follows Henry into the river it is once again personified: the headlights “reach in […] searching,” still lighted even after the car is underwater (154). And just as they did Henry, the surging waters overwhelm the convertible, shorting the wires and bringing darkness. The unnatural turbulence of the present has overwhelmed the natural repose of the past, and at the end “there is only the water, the sound of it going and running and going and running and running” (154).

Works Cited

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, 1984.

Magalaner, Marvin. “Louise Erdrich: Of Cars, Time, and the River.” American Women Writing Fiction. Ed. Dickey Pearlman. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1989. 95-108.