Love Medicine

"Louise Erdrich is prolific. It was really hard to pick one novel by Erdrich. The Round House and The Antelope Wife and The Plague of Doves are all amazing. The reason I picked Love Medicine is because I think about it all the time. Its subject is love and the story, which follows the interwoven lives of three families, shows us so many genres of love and bonds and attachment. The intertwining of families is part of life on many reservations, where a lot of families know each other intimately generation after generation. Erdrich explores what this context and her characters reveal about love. The way that she conceives of love is so sensitive. This is not a conventional romance. Erdrich is sensitive about gender and about how loving relationships change over time. Love Medicine concerns so many categories of love, including paternal love and maternal love and illicit love. Erdrich rethinks love for us. There’s a moment in the middle of the book where one of the characters talks through her love for someone she had an affair with long ago. They talk about the staying power of love and how grief becomes entangled with love. Erdrich novels have big ensemble casts of rich characters that sound out the subjects she’s exploring in her work. Her novels work differently than more plotty fiction. It’s very effective. Native American novels don’t necessarily have to be about the past or about pastness. Native American novels are not just about experiences that are unique to indigenous people. A lot of critics put too much pressure on the literature to be “about” Indigeneity, indigenous traditions or tribal identity. To me, it is more interesting to think about how native epistemologies animate Native American novels."