Land Lasts
Erdrich, Louise
Land Lasts TRACKS by Louise Erdrich Henry Holt. 226 pp. $18.95. Where the modern American novel is concerned, reading the fiction of Louise Erdrich often poses as many problems as solutions....
...Furthermore, the inclusion of one chapter in Tracks under the title "Snares" in The Best American Short Stories of1988, a series that declares in print that it will not consciously accept novel excerpts, only intensifies the problem...
...Picking up in loose form some of the thematic threads begun in Love Medicine (1984) and The Beet Queen (1986), Erdrich documents the tragic loss of land by Chippewa Indians in North Dakota in the years between 1912 and 1924...
...a bear, drunk on a trader's wine, attends the birth of Nanapush's adopted granddaughter Lulu...
...Tracks, Erdrich's third and best novel, is no exception, though in it some of the more problematic aspects of her writing are successfully overshadowed by the strength of her prose and characterization...
...Reducing the tale-telling to only two voices is a structural innovation for Erdrich, whose first two novels were often criticized for their multiplicity of narrating characters...
...two enemies commit the greatest affront possible by cutting the hair of the old woman Margaret...
...Yet there is little doubt in my mind that Erdrich's rich style and evocative language make her a peer of such "mainstream" American writers as Anne Tyler or John Updike, as well as of perhaps the most urgent voice of all in contemporary American fiction, Toni Morrison...
...Land," Erdrich writes near the beginning of Tracks, "is the only thing that lasts life to life...
...Both suffer-as many of Erdrich's characters suffer— from the weight of extreme faiths in a rapidly changing world...
...Starvation," Erdrich says in Tracks, "makes fools of anyone...
...Though useful at times, the technique can be confusing...
...These are brutal years for the Chippewa, when "a new sickness [tuberculosis] swept down," causing the tribe to unravel "like a coarse rope...
...Four chapters of Tracks appeared as short stories in such magazines as Esquire, The Atlantic, and Harper's...
...If the hallmark of fiction in the 1980s is to say nothing at all extremely well, the keynote of Erdrich's creation is nearly the opposite: her prose, centering on life instead of self, moves from one cataclysmic event to another like radio signals jumping along mountain receiving stations...
...The issue is not a new one: Eudora Wel-ty's 1949 novel, The Golden Apples, for example, was reproduced completely in Welty's collected short stories...
...Like the real Indians on and around the North Dakota reservations where Erdrich grew up, her characters, though broken, hungry, and from time to time mad, continue—like Nanapush the old one—to survive...
...Fleur, a witchlike Indian woman, summons a tornado that levels much of the fictional town of Argus in revenge for her rape...
...Tracks is no exception...
...The difficulty with a book such as Tracks comes in positioning Erdrich's use of an "authentic" voice—she herself is partly Chippewa—with the whole question of what constitutes a well-made novel...
...Taking advantage of the tribe's slow decimation, speculators parceled off Chippewa allotments through legal and not so legal means...
...Two narrators lead us through this devastation: Nanapush, a traditional Indian who still prays to the old gods, and Pauline, a mixed-blood woman increasingly infatuated with the most severely martyrlike qualities of Catholicism...
...Her intent seems obvious—to reproduce a sense of tribal consciousness in describing an entire people's history...
...Erdrich's fiction is a welcome contrast to some of the more antiseptic—and solip-sistic—offerings in recent American writing...
...A related and far more serious charge concerning Erdrich's work is that she is not a novelist at all, but a gifted short-story writer who has arbitrarily strung together several independent pieces of brief fiction and called them a novel...
...Andrew Welsh-Huggins (Andrew Welsh-Huggins is a free-lance writer in Providence, Rhode Island...
...Experimental technique does not necessarily make for good fiction, and far too much bad writing currently passes unquestioned through those wide double doors marked "Minority Writing...
...But foolishness in Erdrich's fiction, unlike many other diseases, is curable, and the result often is piercing wisdom...
Vol. 53 • February 1989 • No. 2
