[In the following review, Taylor compliments Erdrich's narrative structure and examination of issues relevant to Native Americans in Love Medicine.]

Set in North Dakota and depicting the lives of the sometimes loosely connected, sometimes over-connected members of the Kashpaw and Lamartine families. (Chippewa Indians interbred with white trash), Love Medicine is a novel about survival, about going home (both locally and metaphysically), about true and false spirits (gods, demons, powers). With seven narrators and an occasional word from the authorial voice, Louise Erdrich covers fifty years (1934-84) of her characters' on- and off-reservation lives. The narratives overlap; they are composed of memories and current events. Each narrator is innocent about, while contributing to, the wider significance of the book. So, Nector Kashpaw, in his forties in 1957, tells how the priest at his high school “would teach no other book all four years but Moby Dick,” and of how he identified with Ishmael:

For he survived the great white monster like I got out of the rich lady's picture. He let the water bounce his coffin to the top. In my life so far I'd gone easy and come out on top, like him.

Later, when Nector has left his wife, Marie, for Lulu Lamartine, he thinks, while waiting for her to return home:

back to the mad captain in Moby Dick and how his leg was bit off. Perhaps I was wrong, about Ishmael I mean, for now I see signs of the captain in myself. I bend over and pick up a tin can and crush it flat. For no reason! A bit later I bang the side of her house until my fist hurts. I drop my head in my hands. I tell her out loud, to get back quick. I do not know what I will do if she doesn't.

She doesn't, and Nector (accidentally?) burns down her house and returns to Marie.

Erdrich also borrows Melville's symbol of the crushing opponent, the omnipotent enemy. The monster's whiteness is significant, for, while this is a novel that concentrates on individuals, the politics of being an American Indian are not forgotten. Lulu, for instance, discusses the question of land:

If we're going to measure land, let's measure right. Every foot and inch you're standing on, even if it's on the top of the highest skyscraper, belongs to the Indians. That's the real truth of the matter.

Penned in by the State and the target of Catholic missions (the Sacred Heart Convent is just up the hill; they all attend mass), the Indians find themselves “shouting” at a government and a god that is “deafening up on us.” Senile Nector yells his Hail Marys in church; “King [smashes] his fist in things, Gordie [drinks] himself down to the Bismarck hospitals”; Gerry Nanapush “was mainly in the penitentiary for breaking out of it”; Marie Kashpaw wrestles with Sister Leopolda for her talismanic spoon—acts which are reminders of the impotent rage of Ahab. Lipsha Morrissey recognizes that communion with the old gods is not what it was: “an art that was lost to the Chippewas once the Catholics gained ground.” As for the alternative: “Was there any sense in relying on a God whose ears was stopped? Just like the government?” The great white monster is exploitative. Earlier, Nector has told how a film company and a rich artist had wanted his body: to die and fall off a horse; to be the naked subject of the Plunge of the Brave (into a churning, cascading river). “The greater world,” he says, “was only interested in my doom.”

Death, rather than doom, pervades the novel. While the characters do keep bouncing to the surface in their coffins (and, like the original Ishmael, they are all, of course, outcasts) when their lives are obsolete, they have the capacity to embrace oblivion like their old tribal forefathers: Henry Lamartine sits in his car on the railroad track; Henry Junior dives into a swirling river; Nector purposely chokes to death; and June Kashpaw begins an epic march “home”:

Even when it started to snow she did not lose her sense of direction. Her feet grew numb, but she did not worry about the distance. The heavy winds couldn't blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn't matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on.

Death for the Indian, like the Catholic, is not the end, but, while Sister Leopolda, the terrifying “saint” who had fought the young Marie's demons with a window pole, a poker, a bread fork and scalding water, looks forward only to a transfigured afterlife, many of the Indian characters experience timeless moments in their earthly lives. They recognize, heathenishly, the forces of nature; they have a sense more of mutability than of salvation: Lipsha, for instance, on the dandelion (and the Indians), “The spiked leaves full of mother's milk. A buried root. A nuisance people dig up and throw in the sun to wither. A globe of frail seeds that's indestructible.”

This richly complex first novel is an expert combination of teller's tales, family saga, tribal consciousness, and of reportage on the anomalous position of the Red Indian in modern society. While the threads (with the book's shifts in time and voice) are initially hard to follow, there is a real sense for the reader, at the end, of having acquired much more than a sum of the book's parts.