While earlier Erdrich novels feature characters who appear in all or many of her first five novels, such as Lulu Nanapush and Marie Kashpaw, the only connections to Erdrich's earlier novels in The Antelope Wife is Rozina Whiteheart Beads' brief mention of a Pillager woman early in the novel and several narrators depictions of places on the eastern Ojibwa reservation or details about the Ojibwa in Montana. Erdrich develops new families in The Antelope Wife; the novel is a fresh start in a familiar world.

What seems likely is that Erdrich will return to many of the new characters in The Antelope Wife in the same way that she developed characters from her earliest work Love Medicine to her previous novel, Tales of Burning Love. The Twin Cities and parts of North Dakota and Montana compose Erdrich's fictional world just as Faulkner's world is encompassed in...