SOURCE: Sutton, Brian. “Erdrich's Love Medicine.” Explicator 57, no. 3 (spring 1999): 187-89.

In the following essay, Sutton discusses the recurring image of the red convertible in Love Medicine.

Literary critic Marvin Magalaner has stated that in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, “water is the all-pervasive symbolic link with the past […] and with the natural environment,” whereas “the unnatural present is epitomized by the automobile” (101). But in the chapter of Love Medicine entitled “The Red Convertible”—a chapter often anthologized separately as a short story—just the opposite is the case: The automobile is associated with a more natural state of affairs—farther in the past, whereas water is associated with unnatural times much closer to the present. The chapter is organized around its closing paragraph, in which a red convertible is swallowed up by the Red River. This closing image symbolically restates what has happened to Henry Lamartine, both individually and...