Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
"Love Medicine" is Louise Erdrich's celebrated debut novel that intricately weaves together Native American storytelling with postmodern literary techniques. The narrative spans three generations of four Chippewa and mixed-blood families—the Kashpaws, Morriseys, Lamartines, and Lazarres—over a timeline from the 1930s to the 1980s. With a structure that features seven distinct narrators, the novel presents a non-linear exploration of identity and community, as each character contributes their unique perspective to the larger story. Themes of alienation, cultural loss, and the struggle to maintain identity in the face of external pressures—such as governmental policies and religious imposition—are central to the characters' experiences.
Erdrich’s characters navigate their lives with a blend of strength, humor, and vulnerability, reflecting the complexities of their existence as they grapple with separation from their communal roots. "Love Medicine" has been widely acclaimed, earning multiple prestigious awards, and resonates with readers by presenting the intimate and universal challenges faced by its characters. This poignant narrative, rich in cultural context, invites readers from all backgrounds to engage with the themes of belonging and resilience.
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Subject Terms
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
First published: 1984
The Work
A dazzling meld of Native American storytelling and postmodern literary craft, Louise Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, was an immediate success. It quickly made the best-seller lists and gathered an impressive group of awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for best first novel, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for best book of 1984 dealing with Indians or Chicanos, the American Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times award for best novel of the year.
Sad and funny, realistic and lyrical, mystical and down-to-earth, the novel tells the story of three generations of four Chippewa and mixed blood families—the Kashpaws, Morriseys, Lamartines, and Lazarres—from the 1930’s to the 1980’s. Seven separate narrators tell their own stories in a discontinuous time line, each a puzzle piece of its own, but by the novel’s end there is one story, one jigsaw puzzle picture of lost identities and the often humorous but always meaningful efforts of a fragmented people to hold on to what is left to them.
The characters in Love Medicine experience individual forms of alienation caused by physical and emotional separation from the communal root of their existence. They contend with the United States government and its policies of allotment and commodities; the Catholic church, which makes no allowances for the Chippewas’ traditional religion; and with the seductive pull of life off the reservation, a life that cuts them off from the community whose traditions keep them centered and give them a sense of their identities. These three factors place the characters under the constant threat of loss of their culture. Erdrich makes this clear, but she presents the lives of her Native American characters as human experiences that readers who have no background in Native American cultures can readily understand. The three generations of characters in Love Medicine surface as human beings who deal with an unfair world with strength, frailty, love, anger, and most of all, a sense of humor.
Bibliography
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. An in-depth look at the feminine in American Indian rituals, storytelling, and so on. This book provides good background information on Native American traditions.
Booklist. LXXXI, September 1, 1984, p. 24.
Christian Science Monitor. LXXVI, November 27, 1984, p. 33.
Downes, Margaret J. “Narrativity, Myth, and Metaphor: Louise Erdrich and Raymond Carver Talk About Love.” MELUS 21 (Summer, 1996): 49-61. Compares the ways that Erdrich and Carver use the similarly structured experiences of love, narrative, and myth in their works. Concludes that stories about love are more “satisfactory” in Love Medicine than in Carver’s work, and presents evidence as to why love works in one set of stories and not another.
Flavin, Louise. “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: Loving Over Time and Distance.” Critique 31 (Fall, 1989): 55-64. A well-developed discussion of how the novel combines aspects of both traditional and contemporary narrative structures. Provides an in-depth look at characters in the novel.
Glamour. LXXXII, December, 1984, p. 190.
Lesley, Craig. “Characteristics of Contemporary Native American Literature.” In New Students in Two-Year Colleges: Twelve Essays, edited by Walker Gibson. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1979. A clear, straightforward account of the main elements of contemporary American Indian literature.
Los Angeles Times. December 20, 1984, V, p. 34.
McKinney, Karen J. “False Miracles and Failed Vision in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” Critique 40 (Winter, 1999): 152-160. McKinney focuses on the conflict between the Catholic dogma of the miracle and the native belief in the personal vision. She examines the early Chippewa encounters with Catholic missionaries and Lipsha’s struggle to come to terms with two different belief systems.
Magalaner, Marvin. “Of Cars, Time, and the River.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. An insightful look at important images, symbols, and metaphors in Love Medicine.
The New York Times. December 20, 1984, p. 25.
The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX, December 23, 1984, p. 6.
The New Yorker. LX, January 7, 1985, p. 76.
Newsweek. CV, February 11, 1985, p. 70.
Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXVI, August 10, 1984, p. 73.
Saturday Review. X, November, 1984, p. 83.
Schultz, Lydia A. “Fragments and Ojibwe Stories: Narrative Strategies in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” College Literature 18, no. 3 (October, 1991): 80-95. Provides excellent background on storytelling and narrative techniques as they apply to Erdrich’s text.
Tanrisal, Meldan. “Mother and Child Relationships in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.” American Studies International 35 (October, 1997): 67-79. Explores the role women have played in the continuity of tribal tradition through childbearing and the transmission of cultural values. Focuses on the mother as not only the biological parent, but the agent of survival for the whole tribe.
Washington Post. November 14, 1984, p. D2.
Zeck, Jeanne-Marie. “Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” Explicator 54 (Fall, 1995): 58-60. Zeck presents an analysis of the chapter “The Beads” in Erdrich’s novel. She focuses on the sexual imagery, the relationship between Eli and Marie, and the use of symbolism.