Volume 32, Number 6 · April 11, 1985
Uprooted
By Robert Towers
Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 272 pp., $13.95
Continental Drift
by Russell Banks
Harper and Row, 366 pp., $17.95
Love Medicine, a first novel by Louise Erdrich which recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award, is very much a poet's novel. By that I mean that the book achieves its effect through moments of almost searing intensity rather than through the rise, climax, and closing of a sustained action, and that its stylistic virtuosity has become almost an end in itself. The prose indeed has remarkable energy and sensuousness. But I found Love Medicine a hard book to penetrate. The episodes, most of them dramatic monologues, are loosely strung together and the relationships of the various narrators and characters are so confusing that one must constantly flip back to earlier sections in an effort to get one's bearings. The reader who perseveres will undergo an imaginary adoption into a nearly forgotten American Indian tribe.
Review, 2808 words
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