Love Medicine (1984) By Louise Erdrich

 

The bargain shelf at a book store was not where I expected to find anything by author Louise Erdrich, but there it was, Love Medicine.

It was published in 1984, the first book of what has been a lengthy and successful writing career. Erdrich has won multiple book awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I eagerly bought it because I wanted to see what her writing style was at its start, comparing it with a couple of her later works that I have read.

The simple but perfect prose was clearly there from the start. But the book structure was a challenge. Love Medicine has a huge cast of characters, with frequent narrator changes, and flashbacks that often cause confusion. By the time she wrote The Bingo Palace ten years later, she began to narrow her focus to main characters, which helped dramatically when it came to the complex plot of The Round House.

Which is not to say that the “lesser” characters had “lesser” stories. They had interesting personal testimonials, often tragic ones helping tell the stories of more modern-day Native Americans, particularly as they pertain to reservation life and discrimination in the country.

The book (the Harper Perennial edition) includes a chart/family tree which is mind-numbing, outlining “Catholic marriages,” “traditional Ojibwe marriages,” and “sexual liaisons,” not to mention the history of “take-ins” (informal foster adoptions). The individual stories of the people on the family tree are told non-sequentially, though they do tie together in a compelling conclusion. Overall, it was a complex and convincing first novel about what holds your life together through the challenge of living. It secured her place as a writer of significance.

Recommendation: You bet.