Over the next month, Sergei and I will be writing a back-and-forth online discussion here about Louise Erdrich’s wonderful novel, LOVE MEDICINE. Best of all–if you’re up for it–will be the comments, emendations, reservations, disagreements, and suggestions from some of the many thousands of readers who visit this site regularly. It takes the KR Community and launches it into an exciting, and virtual, new space.
This initiative is part of KR’s annual Literary Festival (Ms. Erdrich will be presented with the 2009 recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in November). And it’s also part of our response to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to create a Big Read project. The NEA grant thus allows us to expand what we’ve been doing for the past several years, as well as to try new innovations, such as this book discussion. Each week we will be addressing a separate section of the novel. Today I’ll offer some musings about the first two stories/sections/chapters of the book: “The World’s Greatest Fisherman” and “Saint Marie.” For a complete list of the sections as we’ve divided them and the dates we’ll be plunging into them, go to the end of this blog post.
The original version of LOVE MEDICINE was published in 1984, and identified as a novel. That twisted a lot of peoples’ shorts, since this book doesn’t comfortably fit many conventional notions of just what a novel is or ought to be, whether a single narrative with a clear arch or an interconnected set of stories. We’ll actually be discussing the “newly revised” edition from 2008 in its latest paperback version, which includes a few more of those stories/chapters, and which drops the designation of “novel.” I’m not convinced that was necessary.
It’s certainly true that the stories in LOVE MEDICINE aren’t interconnected like different sections of a bridge, creating a single sturdy span. And it’s also true that each of these stories, powerful, funny, lyrical, lurid, works very well on its own. Yet they also form the warp and weft of a complex tapestry. Time itself becomes part of that weaving, less a relentless one-way momentum that sweeps all along in its current, than a stream of many tributaries that binds characters to their families, to each other, even to themselves, at different eddies along the way.
One bit of evidence that these stories do fit together in a coordinated way is that the first, “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” seems the perfect place to start. Set in 1981, which we might think of as a kind of narrative present, it opens with June Kashpaw. “She was a long-legged Chippewa woman, aged hard in every way except how she moved.” June has come from the reservation to Williston, North Dakota, mostly looking for drink and a good time. On her way to the bus out of town, cold and broke, she glimpses a white trucker through the window of the Rigger Bar. Maybe she knows him. Maybe not.
For the trucker all that matters is that June is an Indian woman to feed, ply with booze, and ultimately get in the cab of his truck. To be sure, neither is an ing??nue. Yet June retains a different kind of innocence, a hopefulness to her very core: “But what was more important, she had a feeling. The eggs were lucky. And he had a good-natured slowness about him that seemed different. He could be different, she thought. The bus ticket would stay good, maybe forever.”
Later, after unsuccessful sex in the truck, June pushes the door open and falls free and clear. “Into the cold. It was a shock like being born.” The suggestion is clear enough: that June has gotten about as much out of this life as she’s allowed, that this is a moment of transition. She walks into the wilderness and cold towards the reservation.
“The heavy winds couldn’t blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn’t matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on.
“The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over like water and came home.”
Only in part two of the story do we learn that June never made it to her earthly home at the reservation. But what we also discover is that this woman, so solitary, so hard, so hopeful, has not been alone in the world as we might have expected of more traditional modern literature. Instead, she has been part of a widely and deeply connected family and community. They come together to mourn and to fight, to remember stories and to try and forget too. This launches the novel, and in a sense contains it as well.
What are your thoughts?
To be discussed during the week of Oct. 5th: pages 61-118 (Wild Geese, The Island, The Beads, Lulu’s Boys)
To be discussed during the week of Oct. 12th: pages 119-189 (The Plunge of the Brave, Flesh and Blood, A Bridge, The Red Convertible)
To be discussed during the week of Oct. 19th: pages 190-254 (Scales, Crown of Thorns, Love Medicine)
To be discussed during the week of Oct. 26th: pages 255-333 (Resurrection, The Good Tears, Crossing the Water)