Volume 35, Number 17 · November 10, 1988
Roughing It
By Robert Towers
Tracks
by Louise Erdrich
Henry Holt, 226 pp., $18.95
Breathing Lessons
by Anne Tyler
Knopf, 327 pp., $18.95
Louise Erdrich's first novel, the prizewinning Love Medicine (1984), presents, as through rifts in a smoke screen, lurid glimpses of the struggle of a group of Chippewa and mixed-blood Indians to cope with a life of poverty, alcoholism, and general demoralization on or near a reservation in North Dakota. The treatment is somewhat confusingly episodic, the prose poetically charged with imagery of exceptional vividness. Her second book, The Beet Queen (1986), deals primarily with the inhabitants of a small North Dakota town in the 1950s and only peripherally with the reservation Indians. Even more episodic in structure, it lacks, I think, the power of its predecessor. Now we have Tracks, which, we are told, is chronologically the first in a projected cycle of four novels. Set between 1912 and 1924, it evokes a brutal period of harsh winters, raging epidemics, famine, and expropriation, and it goes a long way toward accounting for the demoralization and uprootedness that prevails in Love Medicine. Several of the characters of that novel appear as infants or at a much earlier stage in their lives in the new work.
Review, 2871 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |