Bloodlines Tracks

By R.Z. Sheppard

Love Medicine (1984) and The Beet Queen (1986) introduced Louise Erdrich as a writer with a bold talent and exotic demographics. Both novels drew deeply from her background in North Dakota, where her German-born father and Chippewa mother worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich's use of history, legend and experience was sophisticated. She is a 1976 graduate of Dartmouth, where her husband Michael Dorris, who is part Modoc, is a professor in the college's department of Native American studies. She has a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins, a pocketful of literary awards and fellowships, and a seat on the executive board of the U.S. branch of PEN, the international writers' organization.

In short, Erdrich, 34, is not the sort of woolly regionalist who captivates critics with untamed energy and an earthy style. She seems to have a plan for her career; she obviously has a blueprint for her imagination. Although set in an earlier time, from 1912 to 1924, Tracks is part of a projected four-novel cycle that began with Love Medicine and The Beet Queen. Characters from the previous novels appear as youngsters in the new one. The narrative is again moved along by different voices carefully boxed in separate chapters.

This time, Erdrich goes to the sources of her saga's bloodlines. Nanapush, a Chippewa elder born in 1862, begins with a stark account of an epidemic that devastated his people during the winter of 1912. "Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken," he laments. Pauline Puyat, born around the turn of the century, picks up the pace with a fanciful tale about one of the survivors, Fleur Pillager, a young girl | who grows to inhabit the book as the central symbol of endurance and revenge. Fleur is also an embodiment of a tribal mythology that includes resurrections, encounters with spirits and lake monsters. By contrast, Pauline, a "skinny big-nosed girl with staring eyes," is a Christian convert who struggles to shed her ancestral beliefs.

Historically, Erdrich is writing about a time when her maternal forebears were losing what little land they had left. Nanapush sees his clansmen tempted out of their holdings with quick-cash offers. He remains an eloquent holdout. "Land is the only thing that lasts life to life," he warns. "Money burns like tinder, flows off like water. And as for government promises, the wind is steadier."

The connections of land to culture and psychology are heavily illustrated with dramatic events and strong imagery. To leave no doubt that Fleur is an avenging witch, Erdrich poses her in front of a boiling vat of animal skulls. A tornado lifts a herd of cattle into the air, where they resemble giant birds, "dropping dung, their mouths opened in stunned bellows." A moose is tracked, killed and butchered in a snowy wood. The warm meat is then molded to the hunter's body, where it freezes to resemble marbled blue armor.

Girded by the white man's religion, Pauline renounces her people: "They could starve and fornicate, expose their young for dogs and crows, worship the bones of animals or the brown liquor in a jar. I would have none of it." Nanapush survives, largely because it seems he has been charged by the author to be around in 1924, when a lumber company starts dropping the trees in whose branches his ancestors once stored their dead.

Despite its confident lyricism and clear passions, Tracks bears the marks of the academic writers' workshop. The device of alternating the voices of the two narrators is schematic and of limited tonal interest. Plot is subordinated to episodic tours de force. In small doses, the graphic descriptions are impressive, but they can also be so relentless as to make the author sound like the thinking reader's Jean Auel.

Erdrich seems too eager to buy the grandiose literary line that the writer is a mythmaker rather than a storyteller. Crammed into a short, intense novel, her characters are too busy hauling symbolic freight to reveal their humanity. The concluding work in the tetralogy may bring all her rich elements together. But do not bet on it, unless Erdrich takes a crash course from Gabriel Garcia Marquez.