An Old Bear, Laughing

By John Skow

A READER WHO HAS NOT followed the doings of Louise Erdrich's bewitched North Dakota Chippewas since her first novel, Love Medicine (missing The Beet Queen and Tracks for no good reason), finds in the fourth telling of the story that not much has changed. That's good; most of the same powerful characters are still around causing trouble, some as hovering spirits, some as living beings. A few years have passed, and in The Bingo Palace (HarperCollins; 274 pages; $23) we are close to present time, but reservation life is still a shabby, cross-cultural muddle. And Erdrich, herself part Chippewa, part German- descended white American, is still a wry, intuitive, blood-related observer and a gifted writer.

The trouble, if it is a trouble, is simply that of any fourth installment. The first wild surge of narrative invention has steadied to a reliable chug. The author's moves are clever and effective, but they are known. Her characters have told the darkest of their secrets. Erdrich's instinct, as the momentum of an anecdote is about to tail off, is to save matters with literary magic. This works, often brilliantly, but it works again and again, which may be a few astonishments too many.

Love Medicine was loose and episodic, but the structure of The Bingo Palace seems all but aimless. So does real life most of the time, but unless Erdrich is herding her large cast toward a fifth novel that will pull things together, the reader is entitled to a bit of head scratching. Over most of its course, the new book seems to focus on a love affair that young Lipsha Morrissey never quite convinces beautiful Shawnee Ray that she should dive into with him. (His failure may have something to do with an unsuccessful vision quest during which he is sprayed by a talking skunk.) But Erdrich loses interest in Lipsha's love troubles, and we hear nothing more. Similarly, a chapter in which Lyman Lamartine, Lipsha's rival, goes off to Las Vegas and loses a big wad of the tribe's money leads nowhere at all.

Or are these seeming plot discontinuities simply a literal-minded, white way of misreading an Indian story? Maybe, maybe not. At any rate, Erdrich's central theme comes through clearly: reservation life does little to preserve the strengths of Native American culture and is a cruel hothouse for its weaknesses. If the present novel needs a map and compass, Erdrich losing her way is preferable to most other writers steering a straight course. Here is her description of Shawnee Ray's busybody mother Zelda: "She should have had more children or at least a small nation to control. Instead, forced narrow, her talents run to getting people to do things they don't want to do for other people they don't like." Lipsha, as the novel begins, adrift in the white world: "He was caught in a foreign skin, drowned in drugs and sugar and money, baked hard in a concrete pie."

And here is the ghost of old Fleur Pillager, forced from her land by the building of a gambling casino, the bingo palace of the title: "She doesn't tap our panes of glass or leave her claw marks on eaves and doors. She only coughs, low, to make her presence known. You have heard the bear laugh -- that is the chuffing noise we hear and it is unmistakable. Yet no matter how we strain to decipher the sound it never quite makes sense, never relieves our certainty or our suspicion that there is more to be told." The author's magic, one more time.