SOURCE: Sands, Kathleen M. “Love Medicine: Voices and Margins.” In Louise Erdrich's “Love Medicine”: A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong, pp. 35-42. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Sands considers stylistic aspects of Love Medicine, maintaining that “ultimately it is a novel, a solid, nailed-down, compassionate, and coherent narrative that uses sophisticated techniques toward traditional ends.”

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich is a novel of hard edges, multiple voices, disjointed episodes, erratic tone shifts, bleak landscapes, eccentric characters, unresolved antagonisms, incomplete memories. It is a narrative collage that seems to splice random margins of experience into a patchwork structure. Yet ultimately it is a novel, a solid, nailed-down, compassionate, and coherent narrative that uses sophisticated techniques toward traditional ends. It is a novel that focuses on spare essentials, those events and moments of understanding that change the course of life forever.

Like many...