Volume 33, Number 21 & 22 · January 15, 1987
Foundling Fiction
By Josh Rubins
The Beet Queen
by Louise Erdrich
Henry Holt, 338 pp., $16.95
Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine was a commanding first book of fiction, but not necessarily the announcement of a major novelist's arrival. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1984, the book consists of fourteen short stories about life on and around a North Dakota reservation in the decades since 1934. Two Chippewa families supply virtually all of the central figures in the stories, which—after a long opening piece set in 1981—are laid out in firmly labeled chronological order. Recurring characters, repeated themes, and entangled bloodlines offer bridges from one tale to the next. Nonetheless, the traditional novelistic devices—narrative shape, momentum, suspense—play almost no part in the book's modest cumulative effect. Instead, the stories in Love Medicine remain stubborn little islands of image-charged prose, often painfully beautiful (and occasionally comic) as they juxtapose the harsh specifics of these Native American lives with the emotional strength, even grandeur, derived from family bonds and mystical beliefs. The parade of oddly neutral first-person narrators, the often confusing crowd of interrelated characters, the seemingly haphazard shifting of close-ups—all these suggest documentary, cinéma vérité, rather than full-length fiction. In fact, Erdrich's first 'novel' seems deliberate, faux naif perhaps, in its asymmetrical patchworking, almost as if a structure would be out of place in such a stark amalgam of poetry and sociology.
Review, 1732 words
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