Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tearsLast week I sat on the steps of a downtown pier, stalled in the summer sun, reading my 1989 paperback edition of Love Medicine. With its Washington Husky-purple cover and title blaring in giant Brittanic Bold white font, the book must have appeared to the uninitiated like a pulp romance. Little did they know it was one of the most significant works of American fiction published in the 1980s, by an author who has become a national literary treasure. Louise Erdrich squeezes the back of our neck and pushes our resisting head to look directly into the lives of Native Americans on a reservation—a part of North American culture about which most of us know very little, segregated as reservations are by politics, geography, contempt, and pity. And the reader does more than observe—she sees, hears, thinks, feels, loves, and suffers as Erdrich’s characters do, through fifty years and the countless episodes of heartbreak, laughter, rage, and grace.Love Medicine opens in 1981 with the death of beautiful but broken June Kashpaw. June stumbles from a truck cab and runs from a stranger who calls her by another woman's name as he makes love to her. She sets out for her home on a North Dakota Chippewa reservation, following her instincts through a later winter storm. But her sharp survival skills, honed in a lifetime of living out-of-doors, cannot overpower the snowstorm or keep her warm in a pair of jeans and a thin jacket. June’s death propels the narrative down a path of memories connecting two Chippewa familes—the Kashpaws and the Lamartines. Love Medicine is the first in Erdrich’s symphony of novels featuring characters from the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota, set in and around the reservation. Although she dies in the story’s opening scene, June’s spirit holds the narrative together. The thread of her life is woven through each character’s story. The author uses a conversational first-person give the reader a sense of second skin with the characters. Mixed in are handful of third-person limited narratives that imbue the story with a lyrical, almost mythical tone. The writing is gorgeous. The characters are so vividly rendered, you feel them in your blood. She was a long-legged Chippewa woman, aged hard in every way except how she moved. AH! Could there be a more perfect sentence? She was a natural blond with birdlike legs and, true, no chin, but great blue snapping eyesGordie had dark, round, eager face, creased and puckered from being stitched up after an accident. His face was like something valuable that was broken and put carefully back together.Even as the characters speak directly to you, drawing you into their secret thoughts, shames and desires, Erdrich’s prose is like music, full of shifting tones and rhythms, crescendos and counterpoints. Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.There they were. And he was really loving her up good, boy, and she was going hell for leather. Sheets were flapping on the lines above and washcloths, pillowcases, shirts was also flying through the air, for they was trying to clear a place for themselves in a high-heaped but shallow laundry cart.There is evil and mystery, as Marie Lazarre escapes the horror of the convent on the hill in the 1930s; Sister Leopolda’s fingers like a “bundle of broom straws, her eye sockets two deep lashless hollows in a taut skull” will haunt your dreams. There are stories of betrayal: Nector Kashpaw turns away from his wife for the comfort of his first love, the easy, sensual Lulu Lamartine, mother of eight boys by eight fathers; June has an affair with tribal legend Gerry Nanapush, whose 6’3”, 250-pound frame cannot be contained by any prison, and leaves their son to be raised by the tribe as she had been. You will ache for Henry’s future, wasted in the jungles of Vietnam and pray that Albertine, the first of her family to attend university, doesn’t waste hers. There is deep despair, as Gordie, wretched with alcohol, hallucinates the deer he has hit is his dead wife, June. He bundles the deer into the back seat of his car and the scene which unfolds is sickening and desperately sad. And there is redemption and love, as tender and insightful Lipsha Morrisey, who isn’t aware until he is a grown man that June is his mother, finds a way to forgive and love the woman who cast him off; as Marie opens her home and heart to stray children; as two old women, enemies since childhood, come together in their final years. It is challenging to keep straight the shared bloodlines and histories. I believe later editions contain a family tree of sorts. But Erdrich explains these connected lives in a way that you realize they are like the root system of an aspen tree—one tree, standing alone, is really part of a vast forest:They moved in dance steps too intricate for the noninitiated eye to imitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath, but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism.Whatever its flaws, and apparently Erdrich found enough to revise the book and publish new editions in recent years, Love Medicine is the reason we read: to be shaken to our core by characters we hate to leave behind as we turn the final pages.
I wish I could pinpoint exactly what it is about Louise Erdrich that I love so much. (I suppose you'll just have to take my word for it, and go check out her writing). This isn't a novel for people who need a strictly linear storyline. This isn't a novel for people who need an action-packed, page-flipping plot. This is for people who enjoy character-driven plots, especially those that revolve around particular families and their drama. This is for people who enjoy soaking in the words and the writing of a storyteller. That being said, if this doesn't sound like your type of book, stay away from it, but if it does appeal to you in any way, I can't recommend Louise Erdrich enough. After reading another of her novels last winter and recently reading one of her middle grade novels, I decided I was going to make an effort to read more of Erdrich. I can't even believe that this is her first novel. I was making notes of meaningful quotes right and left, and she is such a wise person. I think why Erdrich does it for me is because I am a character-driven reader. I love it when I pick up a book and am introduced to characters that I feel like I've known all my life. Erdrich has such a handle on the human condition and on human emotion, it's incredible. Her characters are real. While reading, I never once felt like something a character did or said was contrived or unrealistic. She stays true to her characters. This felt so real to me, that had it not been for her absolutely stunning prose, I would have assumed it to be a non-fiction. Even though this novel isn't all that long, I found myself languishing in her writing and just soaking up as much of it as I could. It's authors like Erdrich that make me wish I had some sort of writing ability. Overall, I can't recommend Louise Erdrich enough. As I said above, if her writing interests you at all, go check it out! You won't be sorry! (And if you are, you can just come yell at me :P).
What do You think about Love Medicine (2005)?
Sometimes the books I enjoy most are the ones I have the least to say about. And what can I add to Toni Morrison's comment that "the beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being completely devastated by its power"? Because reading this book is living, in sweetness and beauty and love, even when it tells terrible things.It's life and there are as may ways of looking at it as there are minds to see, but in so far as these folks have been and still are fighting for survival, not just of the individual bodies but ways of being alive together and the deathlessness of stories. It's a fight fought ducking and rolling and with tricks of all styles, with 'one paw tied behind my back'. Sometimes it's fought by going with the flow, by listening to the heart or the spirit or the craving of flesh, and seeking what's wanted. Sometimes it's fought in humility or by letting go, sometimes by audacity and pride in the face of censure. There are losses and grief, but the dead travel with the living. I know it's life because Erdrich's approach to character is to call people into being and tell their stories as they come to her. The structure here is not beginning middle end but stretched in directions of flow, wandering, straight, circuitous. Rise, fall, in, out, up, down, under and behind, around over and through, branchings and remeetings. It is a riversong, speaking all seasons and all weathers, telling melodies of snow and starlight, drought and storm. You can jump in anywhere anytime and feel the voices of Erdrich's people, feel their loves and ties.Erdrich and her characters deal with racism and colonisation with a wry attitude. I had to laugh as well as sigh at the 'The Plunge of the Brave', Nector Kashpaw's account of the modelling and acting opportunities offered to him that inscribe ever deeper the mythology of the vanishing native. Endless facsimilies of his image dying in regalia could be exhaled into the already poisoned cultural atmosphere.This text is allusive, rich in the symbolic, like the egg June accepts from a stranger in a bar (such openness! It speaks desperation but also the relentless will to survive and flourish somehow), or the huge baby, distilled from immense vivacity, weightless on the commercial scales. Its philosophical skein is stretched over a mystical Catholicism as well as Ojibwe culture and the hollowing horror of North American modernity in poverty. Each character-story has a place in the weave, and sees the lie of land and worldscape differently, and each has their own genius - for love, for getting money, for healing, for raising children:Lulu was bustling about the kitchen in a calm, automatic frenzy. She seemed to fill pots wth food by pointing at them and take things from the oven that she'd never put in. The table jumped to set itself. The pop foamed into glasses, and the milk sighed to the lip. The youngest boy, crushed in a high chair, watched eagerly while things placed themselves around him. Everyone sat down. The the boys began to stuff themselves with a savage and astonishing efficiency. Before Bev had cleaned his plate once, they'd had thirds, and by the time he looked up from dessert, they had melted through the walls. The youngest had levitated from his high chair and was sleeping out of sight. The room was empty except for Lulu and himselfEven as I was reading I couldn't wait to read this again.
—Zanna
There really is, in my opinion, no other writer like Erdich with her intricately connected, multi-generational Native American web of characters; the collision of the mystical/folkloric (if that's a word) and brutal realities of contemporary life; and her poetic language (for instance: "I seemed to exist in a suspension and spent my time sitting at the window watching nothing until the sun went down, bruising the whole sky as it dropped, clotting my heart.") I was anxious to read her first novel (having already read three others) which introduces many of the characters that appear in her later works. So it was all the more surprising to me that the hallmarks mentioned above seem muted in this work. The characters are all related (and their connections are aided by a family tree) but it was difficult to keep them differentiated. I would finish reading a chapter and forget whose perspective it was written from. Many of the chapters seemed only very loosely related, and I noticed that most of the chapters had been originally published separately as short stories. Perhaps this contributes to the lack of cohesiveness. Curiously, one of the chapters that truly bound the characters together was, in my edition, included as a supplement, and the author's note revealed that it was Erdich's choice to excise it and include it in the supplementary material. In spite of these sort-of disappointments, some of the characters introduced in the novel were so intriguing (and I hadn't encountered in the other novels I read... including a disturbingly dark [evil?] nun), that I'm inspired to read more.
—Michael
In Love Medicine, Erdrich weaves together two multi-generational Chippewa family histories. Each member of the family has their say in the family history and tell of abandonment, hopelessness, loss, but also friendship and, as the title suggests, love. In a lot of ways this novel de-mythologizes Native Americans in that many Native American novels portray their life as somewhat utopian--Native Americans as having a mythological reliance upon nature and connection to the land--which in a way dehumanizes NA tribes. Erdrich tells a different kind of story that relies much more on realism. It's often depressing, but at the same time it feels so true, the kind of truth that's good medicine.On a side note, I don't recommend reading this on the kindle. She sets up all the main storytellers in the 2nd chapter, but the kindle did not let me easily move between chapters so that I could remember who everyone was. On top of that, the kindle didn't have the different chapters marked, it often changed the amount of time left in a chapter, or it thought I was finishing the book with it only 40% complete. Very frustrating to read. You're going to want to flip between chapters to make connections between all the stories, so I definitely recommend reading this in print.
—Margaret
