Tracks:
Vecsey, Christopher
TRACKS Louise Erdrich Henry Holt, $17.95, 226 pp. Christopher Vecsey Tracks is Louise Erdrich's third novel of rural North Dakota. Love Medicine (1984) delineated a frayed line of Chippewa...
...She gets no chance at narration, but her vision-as reported by the narrators (and the author)- disallows any romanticizing of either side...
...Old Nanapush, named for the trickster-transformer of aboriginal Chippewa myth, upholder of the ancient, living traditions: the medicines, the hunting and trapping acumen, the land-related ethos, the familiar world view...
...Yet readers will appreciate and applaud the vigor and inventiveness of the author in accurately displaying the passions and obsessions of these two opposing views of the world: Indian and white...
...Some might call him a liar like his namesake, but his lies and truths are tied and committed to ways that have served and survived the centuries' generations...
...Pauline's chapters alternate with those of Nanapush...
...The style maintains the densely spiritual quality of her earlier work, resembling in some ways the "magical realism" of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and reveals some impprtant history of the characters who people this rural world Ms...
...Old Nanapush narrates half the chapters...
...A jaded reader might view the novel as yet another bipolarization of the age-old fight between whites and Indians, a dividing up of the North Dakota landscape into predictable factions...
...She returns, engages in lovemaking and love magic, receives or imagines a vision of the Virgin, gives birth, joins the convent, skins off her Indian ancestry, practices intense self-abnegation, and wages warfare against the Indian pagans who were formerly her associates, allies, and protectors...
...She is a half-breed...
...her lies and truths are tied and committed to a baroque and austere mission-house Catholicism...
...At the crux of this cultural biformity stands the Chippewa witch, Fleur, the mother of an auditor to whom Nanapush tells his version of the truth...
...Louise Erdrich is a and the world she is describing does more than resemble or evoke the environment and people in and around Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, where she grew up...
...Tracks brings the reader back to the early years of this century, 1912-1924, and it ties a knot of narrative around the previous novels...
...The Beet Queen (1986) portrayed a braid of their struggling, non-Indian neighbors of a generation or two ago...
...Erdrich's fable too fantastic for suspension of disbelief...
...A materialist might find the flights of Ms...
...Both books were hung together by lyrical threads that highlighted and augmented the bleak and painful stuff of the stories wherein the lives of these peoples were intertwined...
...The narrative technique reveals the structure of the plot that in itself means to set forward the oppositional strands of twentieth-century Chippewa existence...
...Fleur stands against both worlds, Indian and white, cursing them each in turn, and working fabulous revenge when her times come...
...She, too, is called a liar...
...She lives for a time in the grubby Anglo town of Argus, away from the reservation...
...Nanapush and Pauline engage in alternating narrative combat-his lies, her lies-as the white world inserts its roads into Indian lands, sinks its sawteeth into Indian timber, smothers Indian homes with layers of paper, and poisons Indian souls with printing ink...
...Love Medicine (1984) delineated a frayed line of Chippewa Indian lives in contemporary America...
...Erdrich is creating, or unraveling, before our eyes...
...it embodies it and brings it to life...
...A reviewer might find some of the prose overwrought, and the two narrative voices indistinguishable in their cadences...
...Both were masterworks...
Vol. 115 • November 1988 • No. 19
