Though there are moments of humor to lighten things up, this collection is like having one’s face pressed up against a window to watch miserable people on the other side and not being able to look away for relief. And, as one character tells us later in the collection, drowning is the worst death for a Chippewa. These emotions can be deadly people drown in them. So many of the characters are just following their emotional impulses. The local Catholic church is warped by brutal mysticism. These characters have nothing to turn to when they have no idea what to do next. We also see a deeply broken culture-a recurrent theme in Erdrich’s novels. In others, we see characters wrestling deeply with grief for their lost loved ones. In some stories, it seems as though characters were doomed because of their DNA or their parents’ sins. As the collection progresses, we see these actions and emotions repeated in variations. This first story shows us sexual need, a hint of addiction, and death by either misadventure or suicide. After the act and the man suddenly falls asleep on her, June slips out of the warm truck and walks away into a snowy night. At one of the stops, she meets a man and decides to have sex with him. The last of her money was spent on the bus ticket. The novel begins with a story that encapsulates much of the emotional range of the rest of Love Medicine. June Morrissey is traveling back to the reservation.

This tangled, mostly unspoken web affects the original trio and appears to affect generations of their descendants. Lulu also loves Nector, but her love is more expansive than either Nector’s or Marie’s. Marie loves him and is jealous of his love for Lulu. Nector loves Lulu for the rest of his life. Nector was in love with Lulu before he literally bumped into Marie and, somehow, ended up married to her. In between these two women is Nector Kashpaw. On the other is the equally sprawling, but more dysfunctional, family of Marie Lazarre Kashpaw. On one side is the sprawling family of Lulu Nanapush. Over the course of the novel, I saw two sides form up. But this collection also revolves around love’s darker implications: jealousy, grief, and unrequited love. Several of the stories in this collection is, as the title hints, about love. Love Medicine is one of the earliest of these it includes stories originally published as far back as 1984. I am continuing my out-of-order dive into Louise Erdrich’s collections of interlinked stories featuring characters on an Ojibwe/Chippewa reservation somewhere in the Dakotas.

Louise erdrich love medicine series