[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; where there is violence, it is from Indian family squabbles, husbands against battered wives, fathers caught in child abuse, and drunks in blind attacks against the animals they once venerated.

The noble savage becomes in this book, realistically enough, the ignoble citizen, reduced by externally imposed economic circumstances and the blandishments of media persuasion to a mean, degraded lowest common denominator of existence. Tonto no longer rides the plains beside the Lone Ranger's Silver. In an ironic shift, Albertine, the young student nurse in the novel (who ruminates that “Patient Abuse” can be interpreted two ways by Indians) drives back to the reservation in her “Mustang” car, soon to encounter her cousin, King, who arrives in his “Firebird.”¹

Yet Louise Erdrich in Love Medicine is attempting no historical panorama or sociological tract or study of ethnic relationships. The reader may legitimately infer the presence of these elements; the author's emphasis lies elsewhere. Her primary concern is to delineate the human condition as exemplified in two Chippewa families whose members' lives are recorded in fiction at critical moments, often in the words of narrators in the family, sometimes in the words of an unknown omniscient narrator. Erdrich stresses the interaction of family members as well as the relationship between two families, the Kashpaws and the Lamartines, but always to her the characters are more important than the trends or principles they may embody.

Her people are a strange and lively lot: the prostitute June, no longer young, who dies walking drunkenly through a snowstorm after a sexual encounter; Lipsha, her son, convinced that he has the “touch” necessary to dispense Love Medicine; Lulu, whose eight sons have eight different fathers; Sister Leopolda, who tries with boiling water and an iron hook to force the Devil out of young Marie Lazarre, later the Grandma Kashpaw of the novel; and many others equally vivid in their bizarre behavior.

Allowing characters of this ilk to act upon, and to interact with, one another should have produced a wild novel, replete with slapstick scenes, grotesque confrontations, weird, inexplicable visions, abnormal sexual interludes, and violent exchanges—and that is what indeed happens. June's husband, Gordie, drunkenly runs over a deer, which he then shoves into the rear seat of his car, only to become convinced that the animal is the wife he thinks he has murdered in his rage. June's son, King, also far-gone with drink, wildly attacks his own car in which his wife, Lynette, has locked herself to prevent being hurt by her husband. Senile Grandpa Kashpaw and promiscuous old Lulu Lamartine clumsily attempt a sexual liaison in the Senior Citizens Building's laundry room as young Lipsha watches. Or little Howard, King's son, enthusiastically betrays his father's presence to the police outside the apartment door by crying, “King's here.”

Yet the effect of Love Medicine on the reader is anything but wild, outlandish, surrealistic. Quite the opposite, though the happenings may individually exhibit these qualities, the effect of the whole is cathartic; as a prose poem, it establishes an emotional equilibrium associated with writing of a high order.

The answer lies perhaps in Louise Erdrich's ability to place the petty, sensational lives of her characters in delicate balance with the enduring, changeless qualities of nature: air, sky, dust, water, snow, dandelions, darkness. This she accomplishes through her skillful employment of imagery and symbol. I should like here to examine at some length how she does this in a few illustrative instances.

In an interview published in Belles Lettres, Louise Erdrich confirms what any perceptive reader of Love Medicine does not take long to discover—that the controlling element of the novel is water,² as in her second novel, The Beet Queen, it happens to be air. Simply based on the frequency with which water is mentioned in the story, there is no doubt that the author has decided to concentrate on that element not merely in the development of plot but, beyond that consideration, in everything that has to do with the telling of the tale.

Though Erdrich's authorial control is unobtrusively apparent at every point, the events of the book seem to flow with the fluidity of a liquid. That the author decides to begin the action of the book with June's life and death in 1981, then take the story back to 1934 and return it in stages to periods of time after 1981, requiring a shimmery, ebb-and-flow movement temporally, may account in part for the choice of this element. It is no accident that the novel begins with Easter and June (the person and the month), before we are allowed to learn of June as a youngster and of the family events that occur after June's death.

In addition, Louise Erdrich's unusual decision to have successive chapters, and even sections of chapters, narrated by different characters lends to the novel a fluid mixture of voices, of speech patterns, of grammatical inflections, and of points of view quite unusual in fiction. Even Virginia Woolf, in The Waves, though she establishes set speeches by her six characters, has all of them speak in the sophisticated, literary voice of Virginia Woolf. In Love Medicine, on the contrary, we flow from the polished musings of Marie Kashpaw as she visits the dying Sister Leopolda to the jarring teen lingo of Lipsha Morrisey. In Marie's words: “I sat with her a long while, in silence. The earth was so mild and deep. By spring she would be placed there, alone, and there was no rescue. There was nothing I could do after hating her all these years” (122). And Lipsha's: “I never really done much with my life, I suppose. I never had a television” (189).

As has been said, the most pervasive image in Love Medicine is unquestionably water, in its numerous manifestations. Most obviously, the references are to bodies of water—rivers, lakes, brooks. But Louise Erdrich deals also in less cosmic terms with the image: the ability to shed tears or the curse of being unable to cry; the use of boiling water to exorcise the Devil from young Marie's body; the lack of rain, which leads to the pervading presence of dust as a realistic environmental factor and a rather obvious symbolic aura.

This paramount concern with water leads in turn to several associated though subsidiary motifs involving the relationships of her characters to water. The man ironically named King sees the body of water as engulfing him and associates himself with the smallest and most fragile of its denizens. “‘Minnows,’ he said. ‘It's like I'm always stuck with the goddamn minnows. Every time I work my way up—say I'm next in line for the promotion—they shaft me. … Stuck down at the bottom with the minnows.’” … “‘I'm gonna rise,’ he said.” ‘One day I'm gonna rise. They can't keep down the Indians. Right on brother, huh?’” (252)

The title of the first chapter, “The World's Greatest Fishermen,” reveals the opposite facet of the motif, however ironically it may be interpreted. Traditionally, man has needed access to a river or ocean or stream to sustain life and to build a civilization. Only by making good use of nature's bounty (the water itself, the fish and other sea creatures for sustenance, the current for transportation, the tributaries for irrigation, and so on) has man been able to survive and to advance himself and his descendants. Especially in American historical lore has the availability of water, and its exploitation by indigenous Indian tribes, been central. The image of the Indian in a canoe holding aloft a fish just pulled from the waters below is almost a cliché of American art.

In Erdrich's novel, though King owns the hat identifying its owner as one of “The World's Greatest Fishermen,” it is clear immediately that in King's physical and emotional state it is most unlikely that he could even hold a fishing pole, much less be successful in a battle with a fish at the end of his fishing line. Indeed, the bankruptcy of this contemporary Indian as fisherman (or breadwinner or head of household or transmitter of cultural arts and skills) is one of the incontrovertible points of the book. It is fitting, therefore, that he should abdicate his “King”-ship and, in a mock coronation scene, confer the crown on Eli, the only Indian in the family to follow the old ways, to live alone in his cottage in the woods, unsullied by an education in reservation schools (30).

Whatever else the river means in this context, it must be viewed as an element that no longer offers immediate sustenance to those who have lost the touch. As life-giving water brings death to Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician sailor in Eliot's “The Waste Land,” so it swallows up Henry, the overwhelmed war veteran in Love Medicine. And Nector (Grandpa Kashpaw), a relic from an earlier generation, believes that he will survive the raging waters, as Ishmael and Ahab believe in Moby-Dick, but, senile and broken near the end, he appears buffeted by the forces of life he can no longer control.

In fact, the crucial moments in Nector's long life are narrated significantly through employment of the water metaphor. When his wife, Marie, describes a particularly meaningful sexual reconciliation with him in the early years of their marriage, Nector actually becomes a body of water. Marie thinks: “I went down beneath his hands and lay quiet. I rolled with his current like a stone in the lake. He fell on me like a wave. But like a wave he washed away, leaving no sign he'd been there” (72). Having compared herself to a stone in the lake, Marie expands the analogy on the next page. “I think of small stones. At the bottom of the lake, rolled aimless by the waves. … But I see no kindness in how the waves are grinding them smaller and smaller until they finally disappear” (73). Interestingly, in the course of another reconciliation between Marie and Nector, the husband returns drunk just after the wife has waxed the floor of their home, “which rolled and gleamed like a fine lake between us” (129). At a later point in the novel, Nector recalls his having posed in youth for a painting called Plunge of the Brave, in which he jumps off a cliff into a “rocky river.” “I knew,” he ruminates, “that Nector Kashpaw would fool the pitiful rich woman that painted him and survive the raging water.” He will “let the current pull me toward the surface” and “get to shore” (91).

Nector's attempt to divide his time between two women, his wife Marie and his childhood sweetheart Lulu, is similarly described in aqueous terms. He is “swept” from one woman to another. “I only trusted that I would be tossed up on land when everyone who wanted something from Nector Kashpaw had wrung him dry” (102). The emotional conflict provoked by his having to choose between the two women is only resolved by a solitary late night drive to the lake and a swim. “I gave her [Lulu] up and dived down to the bottom of the lake where it was cold, dark, still, like the pit bottom of a grave. … Perhaps I should have stayed there. … But I didn't. The water bounced me up. I had to get back in the thick of my life” (103).

Finally, after Nector's (Grandpa Kashpaw's) funeral, Lipsha Morrisey's grief is couched in another metaphor of water. “As I lay there, falling asleep, I suddenly felt Grandpa's presence and the barrier between us like a swollen river” (213).

It should be manifest then that, whatever its merits, Louise Erdrich is exploiting the water theme for all it is worth. Space limitations preclude extensive treatment of the motif as applied to the other characters of the novel—to June, walking over the snow “like water” to her death; to King, trying to drown his wife by holding her head down in the kitchen sink; to Henry, deliberately drowning himself in the lake; to Lipsha, who doesn't want to be “like foam throwed off the waves of the lake, spin drift, all warped and cracked like junk and left to rot” (247).

The question still to be faced is why the author selected water in Love Medicine as the central metaphor. Even a casual reading of the history of the Ojibway (Chippewa) Indians impresses the reader with the pervasive presence and importance of water in their everyday lives and in the life after death prepared for them by the Great Spirit. Rivers, streams, lakes, oceans, ponds abound in the literature of the Ojibways as required for the existence of the nation; indeed, wars are fought over the possession of choice land with free access to water. When a group moves from one location to another, the availability of a body of water for transportation, for fishing, for drinking is paramount in the selection of a new site. Indian life, in the absence of a body of water, is thus unthinkable.

As George Copway reports, the goodness of the divine creator is evidenced in his concern to provide water for his people. “Benevolent Spirit … who made the earth. … His benevolence I saw in the running of the streams, for animals to quench their thirst and the fishes to live.”³ In fact, material things are seen as ephemeral while Nature remains eternal. “Nature will be Nature still while palaces shall decay. … yes Niagra will be Niagra a thousand years hence! the rainbow … shall continue as long as the sun, and the flowing of the river. While the work of art, however impregnable, shall in atoms fall.”⁴ Further, in his history of the Ojibway Indians, William Warren tells how the soul departs the body at death and proceeds west until it reaches a “deep, rapid stream of water, under a bridge,” in a land of spirits full of “clear lakes and streams.”⁵ Given such frequent reiteration of the religious and historical affinity of the Chippewa people with water, it is not surprising that Louise Erdrich chooses to build her novel around that element.

But life off and on the reservation for Erdrich's characters in the mid-twentieth century may no longer be energized by the blandishments of nature or the promise of the life beyond. The only instance in the book in which the author refers to Indian Gods is recited, tongue in cheek, by Lipsha.

Now there's your God in the Old Testament and there is Chippewa Gods as well. Indian Gods, good and bad, like tricky Nanabozho or the water monster, Missepeshu, who lives over in Lake Turcot. That water monster was the last God I ever heard to appear. It had a weakness for young girls and grabbed one of the Blues off her rowboat. She got to shore all right, but only after this monster had its way with her. She's an old lady now. Old Lady Blue. She still won't let her family fish that lake.

Our Gods aren't perfect, is what I'm saying, but at least they come around.

[194-95]

Deities, Christian or Indian, seem anachronistic in the century of Vietnam and the Holocaust. Religious ecstasy has been replaced by the worship of the beer can, which one of the characters crushes into icon shape and sets up for adoration. Dust, rather than water, has encroached upon the reservation in actuality and in symbolic import. The myth of the Benevolent Spirit is losing ground to the myth of the car, while true healing by the Gods is giving way to Lipsha's mumbo-jumbo medicine.

Though the spiritual power of water is thus diminished in Love Medicine, its power as a symbol and as a presence remains. The river, for instance, endures as a direct link between the Indian past and the less ennobling present. “I'd heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems.” Lipsha continues, “It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves; but the truth is we live on dry land” (272). The river also remains an awesome power for life and death—a power even greater than that of the car in modern existence. “Drowning,” the reader is told in Love Medicine, “was the worst death for a Chippewa to experience” (234). At the same time, living without the proximity of water is a dreaded fate.

Finally, Louise Erdrich is aware of water as embodying time and memory—elements that determine to a considerable extent the content and the shape of her novel: the multivoiced narration, the generational approach, the jumbled time sequence, the choice of motif and metaphor, and the pattern of symbolic associations that makes the book so rich.

If water is the all-pervasive symbolic link with the past, with time past and to come, and with the natural environment, then the unnatural present is epitomized by the automobile. Louise Erdrich did not have to invent the symbol. More than half a century earlier, Aldous Huxley had commented on a shift in deity from Our Lord who art in Heaven to our Ford which art in Detroit. Evelyn Waugh had followed with a scene in which racing cars careen wildly around a circular track in an effort to return to the starting point first—a futile exercise in getting nowhere fast. And Flannery O'Connor in her stories often employs the image of the motorcar for whatever emotional mileage she can get out of it.

In Love Medicine the car is used by the author as a multipurpose tool to exhibit her Indian families adjusting (or failing to adjust) to their twentieth-century role. Required for life on and off the reservation, the car is at once as familiar as a hat or as a grocery bag, but, at the same time, invested with a mystique that engenders the awe and respect once reserved for venerated natural spirits. “It was as if the car was wired up to something. As if it might give off a shock when touched” (22). It is to the interior of this car that Lynette flees to take sanctuary from the threat of physical violence posed by King's drunken anger; and it is on this car that King takes frustrated revenge, seeking to get at his wife inside (32). The car, incidentally, is a Firebird, formerly an object of religious adoration by the Chippewa Indians.

From the beginning of the novel to the end, the car is there at moments of heightened intensity and dramatic climax—moments when life and death hang in the balance. In the first section of the opening chapter, the mud engineer's car is the scene of June's sexual encounter and the place where she becomes drunk enough to die in the snow shortly afterward. Indeed, though she seems unimpressed by the sexual prowess of her partner, it is the car itself that appears to acquire erotic characteristics. The heater's controls accidentally activated by the groping couple, “she felt it open at her shoulders like a pair of jaws, blasting heat, and had the momentary and voluptuous sensation that she was lying stretched out before a great wide mouth. The breath swept across her throat, tightening her nipples” (5). The car, personified, has its way with her (as the water monster had with the Blue maiden) as she lies ritually prone, “slipping along the smooth plastic seat” as on a sacrificial altar. And all this on the Easter weekend.

Fittingly, the final scene of the book, narrated by June's son, Lipsha, involves several of the same elements. Driving the car he has won from his brother, King, in a poker game (a car purchased with insurance money King received at his mother's death), Lipsha notices damage done to the car's exterior. “There was nicks and dents in the beautiful finished skin. I ran my hand up the racy invert line of the hood” (266). As his senses experience sensual enjoyment, his mind concentrates on the flight from the police of his father, Gerry Nanapush. “I knew my dad would get away. He could fly. He could strip and flee and change into shapes of swift release. Owls and bees, two-toned Ramblers, buzzards. … These forms was interchangeable with his” (266). Gerry, however, is not flying. He is at that moment hiding in the car trunk. “He was curled up tight as a baby in its mother's stomach, wedged so thoroughly it took a struggle to get him loose” (267). But if one's form is “interchangeable” with “two-toned Ramblers,” it is no far stretch of the imagination to see his birth in the womblike depths of a Firebird car trunk. Gerry, constantly on the run from the police, is thus depicted as the offspring of a car; Lipsha's mother, June, as the sexual partner of one; and her legacy to their son, Lipsha, through King's bad luck at poker, the car bought with the insurance proceeds. It is highly significant that in this car the son, Lipsha, is atoned with the father at last, as it speeds toward the border and freedom.

It is perhaps unnecessary to multiply instances in the story in which the use of the car is central. When Lulu's husband, Henry, decides to take his life, he stops his car on the railroad tracks and waits for the death that swiftly claims him under the wheels of an even more imposing iron monster. When Lulu Lamartine determines that she will have Nector in middle age, as she has seduced him in youth, she invites him into her car for the attempt. Young Henry Lamartine calmly walks into the river to his death, overcome by his experience in the Vietnam War, at which point his brother, Lyman, drives their red convertible into the river, perhaps as tribute to the river god, perhaps as an offering to his drowned brother. For whatever motive, this swallowing up of the shiny, metallic new god by the hungry mouth of the old is an obvious but appropriate way for Erdrich to join the two.

The most dramatic and jarring employment of the car in the novel occurs in the “Crown of Thorns” chapter. Gordie, drunk, invokes the shade of his dead wife, June, by uttering her name. In horror he flees the apparition in his car, running down and injuring a deer on the highway. Having decided to drive off with the carcass of the animal, he discovers that he does not have the key to the locked car trunk, at which point he sees “clearly that the setup of life was rigged and he was trapped” (179). He is forced, therefore, to wedge the doe into the backseat. On the journey the deer revives and, through the rearview mirror, stares back at Gordie. “She saw into the troubled thrashing woods of him. … She saw how he'd woven his own crown of thorns” (180). Gordie kills her for good this time with repeated blows of a crowbar, but then, in a moment of dazed illumination believes that “he'd just killed June”: “She was in the backseat, sprawled, her short skirt hiked up over her hips” (181). The enormity of his presumed act leads him to Sister Mary Martin for confession and then to flight from the authorities. “They heard him crying like a, drowned person, howling in the open fields” (188). The animal has become a person, the person an animal.

The life in which Gordie and his contemporary fellows are trapped is represented as a car to whose locks the owner does not possess all the required keys—a hurtling, mechanical object driven drunkenly and unsteadily from point to point. It is not that the natural has been abandoned by the modern Indian; the natural has been perverted. To the actors nothing is what it seems to be. The “World's Greatest Fishermen,” the mighty hunters, are reduced, as in Gordie's situation, to running over their prey and then bashing in the head with a tire iron. The hunted animal takes on human, noble qualities so lacking in the hunters. The deer's “look was black and endless and melting pure” (180). In the logical next step, to Gordie the animal is transformed into a human being, his dead wife, June, who had previously been described by the author as a “wild” thing. The vision of the deer-as-June that he experiences in the car, her clothing awry, sprawled on the vinyl seat, is very much a replay of the opening scene of the book in which June's animallike sexual encounter in the mud engineer's car is described. But even if the wife-June-prostitute echoes had not been introduced by Louise Erdrich, the incongruous and grotesque image of a deer perched upright like a human being in the backseat of a car—of the natural reduced to the unnatural, of the eternal placed in juxtaposition to the dated and the mechanically limited (was the car a used 1963 Buick?)—would have been more than enough to drive home the point. Maybe it is not even necessary for the author, in the final sentence of the episode, to depict Gordie as transposed into the hunted beast, “howling in the open fields.”

It should be pointed out, incidentally, that Erdrich's fascination with the car as symbol extends to her second novel as well. In The Beet Queen, the most unusual section is the attempt of Dot's mother and Mary Adare to force Sita's body, stiff with rigor mortis, into their delivery truck and their subsequent ride in the parade of the Beet Queen, upright corpse and all, through the center of town. More than once, the interior of a car is described as a “cave,” as a means of escape, of isolation, of enclosure, or of entrapment.

In Love Medicine imagery of enclosure abounds, partly, it seems clear, to highlight the dilemma of the Indian characters, savages now forced into tameness by material progress, by regimentation in the armed forces, by life on a reservation, by confinement in a prison, by employment in the tiny, stifling weighing hut, and even, as has been said here, by the necessity to adapt to the automobile. Only Eli, kept out of school by his mother and sheltered from “civilizing” influences, retains a measure of openness to nature and his tradition. From the very beginning of the book, the reader is confronted by this unmistakable motif. Though June and her pickup are in a bar drinking “Angel Wings,” she must stumble on all-too-human legs to a bathroom stall and lock herself in. She even carries with her the doorknob of her room as the only sure way to keep the door locked in her absence. The second section begins with June “not only dead but suddenly buried” in the last enclosed space of all. Further on in the novel, describing Gerry and Dot's unborn child, Erdrich reinforces the motif. “The child was as restless a prisoner as its father, and grew more anxious and unruly as the time of release [from the womb] neared. As a place to spend a nine-month sentence in, Dot wasn't much. Her body was inhospitable. … The child was clearly ready for a break and not interested in earning its parole” (163-64). Whether the sense of enclosure is physical or emotional, it seems to be shared by members of both the families in the book. Nector is trapped in his mind. Lipsha is forced to witness Grandpa's sexual fumblings with Lulu in the laundry room when he finds his tactful withdrawal cut off. Lulu experiences entrapment in her burning house, while Gerry temporarily entombs himself in the car trunk of King's automobile. Finally, it is interesting to note that even June, liberated from her boarding house room, freed from the toilet stall, released from the mud engineer's car, a “free” spirit no longer confined to her skin and bones, is yet compelled to appear to her husband at his call, presumably from the grave, trapped as a wifely spirit for all time.

Reinforcing the theme of enclosure and entrapment as early as the second paragraph of the novel and extending to the end is the employment of the shell motif. That its first appearance should be in connection with colored eggs on the counter of a sleazy bar during the Easter weekend (on which the body of Christ was nailed to a cross but on which He also attained the ultimate freedom through resurrection into Heaven) must be noted. June's sex customer is first seen “peeling” a blue egg—the “beacon” toward which June walks for the last assignation of her life. The small talk between them is almost too obviously pointed. He offers to peel a pink one for her because “it matched her turtleneck.” She corrects him, saying that her vest is called a “shell.” “He said he would peel that for her too.” The sexual innuendos serve to reveal June as egglike and fragile but enclosed in a shell that permits her to ply her trade indifferently. When she locks herself in the bathroom stall (a substitute for her shell), she recalls her client's hand “thumbing back the transparent skin and crackling blue peel.” Sitting in the stall, “she seemed to drift out of her clothes and skin with no help from anyone,” and she feels her body “pure and naked—only the skins were stiff and old.” In the car, as the mud engineer removes June's slacks, Erdrich tells the reader that the fabric “crackled with electricity and shed blue sparks when he pushed them down,” to balance perhaps with the description of the aftermath: after releasing the car door, June falls out “into the cold. It was a shock like being born. But somehow she landed with her pants halfway up.” She adjusts her clothing and “pulled her shell down.” At this point June plows through the drifts toward the reservation undaunted. “June walked over [the snow] like water and came home” (2-6).

The mixture of the vaguely religious and the specifically carnal in Love Medicine, focused on the peeling and unpeeling of Easter eggs, would not in itself sustain the motif for almost three hundred pages; Erdrich, however, supports the early allusions throughout the story. Her characters are almost all desirous of shedding their bodies to live as spirits. Marie has a vision of passing through walls. Nector leaves his body for a new one. Lulu, hemmed in by arms and legs, looks “forward to getting past them.” Her hope is to “be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood” (226). Even Dot's baby longs to break out of the womb.

In her enthusiasm for the motif, Erdrich mentions shells as often as she can. The Easter eggs and June's sweater as shells have been mentioned. But the reader is also aware of Marie's toenails as “pink ocean shells” (40); Eli “had to save on my shells,” (28) thinking how expensive ammunition was. And King, in his wild drunken rage, destroys the fruit pies so lovingly prepared by Zelda and Aurelia. “Bits of jagged shells were struck to the wall and some were turned completely upside down.” Though Albertine tries to reconstruct the pies, she is unsuccessful, for “once they smash there is no way to put them right” (37-38).

In a novel of human relationships and the interactions between two families over a generation, the use of the egg and eggshell motif is very appropriate. Grandma Kashpaw is referred to as a hen or as a chicken on more than one occasion. The book is a chronicle of love and hate, of violence and sexual reconciliation, of attraction and repulsion, of attempts to connect and retreats to isolation. No wonder then that “peeling” and “shell” have such wide application throughout the story. Robert Frost's comments in “Mending Wall” on the dual use of a wall both to wall in and to wall out are particularly apposite here. Interesting too is the fact that among the Ojibway Indians a giant shell, associated with the sun and with its setting and rising over water, is a major component of the religion—though its relevance in Love Medicine is tenuous.⁶

Louise Erdrich's novel is rich in much more than the vivid and poignant story she has to tell. Though on the surface it deals with simple people working out their daily lives in elemental flashes of love and hate and primitive violence, this is no Wild West adventure yarn. Rather, the narrative material is moulded with aesthetic precision, even when the narrator of the passage is untutored, ungrammatical, and illogical. The overriding aim appears to be the recreation of two families over a long period of time, for the basic unit of Chippewa life, as Erdrich sees it, is just that family structure. There may be constant strife among family members, there may be marked contrasts between the younger generation and the older, but the sense of belonging to the family is evident throughout, both in the memory of the family members and in their reactions to immediate familial crises.

Indeed, the images I have chosen to deal with here seem designed to advance the theme of family and to effectuate its presentation. The flowing of water has long been associated with the operation of memory. In Love Medicine the Chippewa family line, as well as the lines of the Kashpaws and the Lamartines, is filtered to the reader through the memory flow of family members: a quick-running stream of remembrance here, a slow and deliberately muddy flow of recollection there. Just as effectively, [the movement of the young Chippewas from fishing and swimming to reckless driving in automobiles signals the encroachment of a mechanical and impersonal civilization upon the natural environment of the families. It is but a step from that conclusion to the author's pervasive interest in closed spaces (particularly, the interior of automobiles) as the logical and pernicious consequence of the families' retreat from nature.] Louise Erdrich's employment of such imagery enormously enriches the novel in a work of artistic patterning at its best.

Notes

1. In this essay page numbers from Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine are given in parentheses in the text.

2. Nan Nowik, “Belles Lettres Interview,” Belles Lettres 2 (Nov.-Dec. 1986): 8-9.

3. George Copway, “The Life of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh,” in Touchwood: A Collection of Ojibway Prose, ed. Gerald Vizenor, Many Minnesotas Project Number 3 (Minnesota: New Rivers Press, 1987), 47.

4. Ibid., 50.

5. William Warren, “History of the Ojibway Nation,” in Touchwood: A Collection of Ojibway Prose, 20.

6. Ibid., 22-23.