Musings: Love Medicine

Louise' Erdrich's Love Medicine is an intricate story centered on two Chippewa families, the Kashpaws and the Lamartines, and the way the family members interact with each other.  The story begins with June, a beautiful woman, down on her luck, whose sudden and accidental death has a profound effect on the lives of the people who knew her.  Readers travel back and forth in time with multiple characters, experiencing their lives as they unfold, watching as they make mistakes, recover, and then stumble again.  We see how the American government impacts their lives, how Christian missionaries abuse their culture, and how, over time, proud people become mistrustful and vengeful, falling into alcoholism, violence and dead ends.

Native American contemporary history is pretty bleak.  It's a story of almost complete annihilation, isolation, broken promises and misguided compromises.  Even using the phrase "Native American" in a way is defeatist- even 100 years ago, people knew tribes as being distinct, having very different ideas about life and how to live it.  Now, there are so few of them left that we group them all together and are completely unaware of the nuances that separate one tribe from another.

Louise Erdrich writes about all this, but indirectly, through a series of short stories interwoven with each other to form a novel.  We meet so many characters, all of them flawed, none of them very likeable and yet we can empathize with every one.  There is so much sadness in this book- so much lost potential, so much despair, so much waste, often symbolized by bouts of extreme drunkenness and violence.  The people in this story hurt each other, over and over again, and yet still readers cross their fingers and closer their eyes tight and wish that somehow, they'll all make it through okay in the end.

I didn't love this book, but I loved the writing.  Erdrich writes like a poet, and while I had a lot of trouble while reading this book keeping characters separate in my mind, and understanding where in the timeline the plot was (it skips around a lot over 50 years), this was always very clear to me.  Erdrich can write, and this is one of the most impressive first novels I've ever read.  To do multiple points of views, all over the course of fifty years, is a very ambitious undertaking, but Erdrich manages it very well.  It was me, with my stop-and-go reading habit, that made this read difficult.  This isn't the sort of book you can pick up for twenty minutes a day, and then not read for four days, and then pick up again for another half hour.  It requires concentration, organization and memory.  Give it that much respect, and I think it will pay you back tenfold.  Don't, and you may be left scrambling to understand what's happening, the way I did.

This is not a hopeful book.  It details, starkly, life on a reservation.  Its characters struggle with their lives, some sinking into despair on the reservation and others attempting to leave but finding that they are always somehow drawn back.  Like Sherman Alexie described in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, being successful by American standards is not necessarily a positive thing to Native Americans.  They hate and distrust the American justice system (understandably) and government, and so finding a way to balance personal ambition with cultural identity is a difficult path to navigate.  Louise Erdrich's story was, to me, a companion novel to Absolutely True Diary, about the lives of the secondary characters many years in the future. I didn't love any of the characters- and in fact, disliked quite a few of them- but they were so mired in inevitability, in some sort of never-ending spiral, that it was hard not to feel compassion for them.

This was a great read, but it definitely requires commitment, engagement, and emotional strength.  Definitely not a light summer read, but one I'm very glad to have read- and an excellent introduction to an author I'll be sure to look out for in the future.