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Return to the 'Res'
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12109 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1994 |
2,045 Words |
| Author
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Louis Owens
Louis Owens' teaches English at the University of New Mexico.
He is coauthor of American Indian Novelists and author of
Steinbeck's Revision of America. |
THE BINGO PALACE
Louis Edrich
New York: HarperCollins, 1994
288 pp., $23.00
Louise Erdrich fancy-danced her way onto the best-seller lists back in 1984 with Love Medicine, the first volume in what, with the publication of The Bingo Palace, has become a Native American quartet. Love Medicine won awards: the American Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Best First Novel, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize, the American Book Award, and the Los AngelesTimes award for best novel of the year.
Although a few critics begrudged Erdrich's loose, highly episodic style, most seemed to respond to Love Medicine as though it represented a breakthrough in Native American writing. Perhaps more significantly, Erdrich's first novel became a bestseller, winning countless readers with its loose-jointed, prismatic narrative of hard times and troubled souls on the reservation. Instantly, Erdrich and her husband and frequent collaborator, Michael Dorris, were the most popular and visible of Native American writers.
Love Medicine was followed by The Beet Queen (1986), another multiple-narrative, episodically structured fiction set this time just off the "res" in America's desperate hinterland. Whereas Love Medicine focused on a radically and painfully fragmented reservation community, the more tightly woven narrative of The Beet Queen dealt forcefully with thin lives in a hardpan town on the edge of nowhere. In 1988, Erdrich published Tracks, the third part of this set and a prequel to both of the earlier volumes. A luminous and powerful work, it takes the reader back a generation to explore the historical and tribal torsions that laid the foundation for stories readers already knew from the earlier novels.
Love Medicine featured June Morrissey, a subtle fusion of feminine Christ-figure and traditional trickster, whose death on Easter Sunday in the novel's opening scene prepares for her resurrection within the memory stories of the novel's narrators. Most prominent among those narrators is Lipsha Morrissey, the son June had abandoned and, it is hinted, even tried to drown. Lipsha is the shy possessor of a healing touch and reluctant practitioner of troubled love medicine. Within the novel we become caught up in the messy, poignant, and often darkly humorous stories of three inextricably tangled generations of Chippewa and mixed-blood families: the
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