Love Medicine

The instinct to turn towards home, to seek refuge there in times of strife, kicks off Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. June Morrissey, drunk and struggling in Williston, North Dakota, decides to head back to the reservation when she was born and raised. The problem is that she doesn't have proper winter clothes and there's an enormous blizzard. She dies on her journey, and the book moves both forward and backward in time to tell the story of June, her quasi-adoptive parents Nestor and Marie Kashpaw, Nestor's childhood sweetheart Lulu Lamartine, June's children and cousins and nieces and nephews and a whole sprawling cast of others. It's classified as a novel, but honestly is much more a collection of short stories about a common set of characters. The placement of the stories is obviously deliberate, revealing information about the subjects bit by bit, but the book as a whole doesn't really have a defined narrative arc.

I think, for a lot of people who grew up far from reservations and didn't really know many (or any) Native Americans, it can be easy to think about them as almost preserved in amber...our idea of what “an Indian” looks like and what their experiences are is rooted in black and white photos and/or stereotypes. Even though some might think it's less damaging because it's romantic (in the larger sense of the word), it's still a prejudiced and honestly racist way of thinking. Native Americans still exist. They live in the world. They talk on cell phones. But they remain mysterious to many other Americans, which is why this book isn't just good, it's also important, in that it presents a realistic portrait of Indian life on a reservation, showing it to be full of people: some better, some worse, some smart, some dumb, some kind, some harsh. It has its own challenges and experiences just like any other community, but it's made up of the same kinds of humans we find everywhere.

As might be expected for a book with the word “love” in the title, the bonds we form with others, both those rooted in blood and those created by the body and the heart, is the central through-line connecting the pieces of the story together. Though no one's story is presented in a straightforward, neatly chronological way, Erdrich creates vibrant characters who resonate with emotional truth over the course of the narrative. She gives us little snapshots of their lives at points in time, pieces that begin to cohere into a whole. That this book spawned multiple sequels doesn't surprise me at all: the people she creates clearly have long histories that bear further exploration.

This is a book that strongly favors characters over plot. While all of the individual stories have their own little dramas, there's not a lot of narrative flow over the course of the book. The real interest is in seeing the characters over the course of their lives, meeting a woman when she's a grandmother and then getting a look at the young woman she was before the rest of her life happened, figuring out how she might get from there to here, getting little glimpses along the way. Erdrich's writing is beautiful: it tends towards the lush without veering into purple prose territory. I will say, though, that effectively as she does wield her chosen episodic format, the lack of tension or drive to the book was a bit of quibble for me and it was hard to get “sucked in” because of it. Even so, this is a very good book and I would recommend it widely. It might not quite be your cup of tea in the end, but it's very much worth reading.