The action of Louise Erdrich's TheAntelope Wife, which spans more than a century, traces guilt and love through several generations of three families, the Roys, the Shawanos and the Whiteheart Beads. One of the character-narrators of the novel, Cally Whiteheart Beads, summarizes the novel as follows: Family stories repeat themselves in patterns and waves generation to generation, across bloods and times. Once the pattern is set we go on replicating it. Here on the handle the vines and leaves of infidelities.

There, a suicidal tendency, a fatal wish.

On this side drinking. On the other a repression of guilt that finally explodes.

The novel begins in the latter part of the nineteenth century when Quaker Scranton Roy enlists in the U. S. Cavalry after being spurned by a woman he desires. As his company enters an Ojibwa village, Roy's contempt for the Indians escalates to frigid...