American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The recent and laudable interest in expanding the canon of American literature has elevated certain works to prominence. One of these is Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. This fine novel has it all-a Native American woman writer, a challenging cast of characters, most of whom have at least some Indian blood, a reservation setting, an honest look at the poverty, suicide, and alcoholism that abound in Indian communities, a frown at the policies and practices of the dominant Anglo society, a wonderfully subtle humor, and, finally, a positive and reassuring focus on the power of love. Love Medicine is an ideal novel to teach, not only because it contains all that and more, but because it works both as a novel and as a series of short stories. Many of its pieces, after all, appeared originally as short stories. Teachers who do not have time to teach the whole novel can assign certain portions of it for class discussion and leave students to read the rest on their own. Unfortunately, however, Love Medicine does not always make a good impression on readers who encounter it for the first time. It strikes them as being made up of a vast sea of partially delineated characters taking part in a wild array of events that span a too-long period of time. Furthermore, because the telling is not consecutive, students find that what plot there is tends to whip confusingly from before 1920 to after 1980. In short, beginning students tend to find the characters confusing, their family trees impossibly contorted, the plot disconnected.