False Miracles and Failed Vision in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine

Abstract

In the last decade of the twentieth century, American culture seems increasingly at war with itself; racial and cultural divisions appear to be at once more marked and more insidious than ever before. We read the endless essays in “liberal” journals, listen to reactionary shoutings on the radio, and turn with disgusted disbelief from the “talk” shows on television. Then, some works of literature come to our rescue, as the reflecting ponds in which we can see some sort of truth that we can feel seep into us on an emotional, even a spiritual level. Louise Erdrich is a purveyor of such works, a novelist who writes from her perspective as a person of both Chippewa and German ancestry, sometimes assisted by the late Michael Dorris, her former collaborator and former husband—also of mixed heritage.