American Indian Culture and Research Journal

We have one priceless universal trait, we Americans. That trait is our humor. What a pity it is that it is not more prevalent in our art. -William Faulkner Many early reviewers of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine treat the novel as though it were at heart a tragic account of pain. They see Erdrich as merely a recorder of contemporary Indian suffering, as an evoker of her characters’ ”conflicting feelings of pride and shame, guilt and rage-the disorderly intimacies of their lives on the reservation and their longings to escape.” These critics classify Love Medicine as “a tribal chronicle of defeat,” a ”unique evocation of a culture in severe social ruin,” and an ”appalling account of . . . impoverished, feckless lives far gone in alcoholism and promiscuity.” Each of these descriptions betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the novel; any reckoning of Love Medicine as an ultimately tragic text begs contradiction. To be sure, the book contains much that is painful. Its undying vision, however, is one of redemption-accomplished through an expert and caring use of humor. Erdrich’s characters by novel’s end are not far gone, but close to home; she evokes a culture not in severe ruin, but about to rise; she chronicles not defeat, but survival. Love, assisted by humor, triumphs over pain.