Tales of Burning Love

National Catholic Reporter, May 24, 1996 by Michael Lee

Each of Louise Erdrich's novels offers new evidence that by the time her writing career has ended, her fictional world will prove to be larger than the sum of its novelistic parts.

In this ever-widening world, history and geography give way to mythic time and space, characters become more interesting than the merely plausible versions of the people they represent and events are capable of becoming imbued with magic and mystery even as they depict the mores and manners of a particular place and time.

As characters from one novel reemerge in another and as events once told are retold with a new twist or from a different point of view, Erdrich's narrative voices reveal heretofore hidden facts or facets of character and her plots offer illuminations that sometimes dispel points of prior confusion, but just as often add to a growing sense that life is better embraced as mystery than partially understood via mere surface knowledge and factual information.

To put it another way, Erdrich subordinates her narratives to a larger Narrative. Her stories, each compelling in its own right, take on added dimension as installments in an ongoing saga of her own fictional equivalent of William Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha -- her vision of a North Dakota whose unique cultural blend of Ojibwa and Euro-American peoples, reservation politics and gaming interests, agribusiness and real-estate development, alcoholism and Catholicism, racism and tribal pride, promiscuity and asceticism, tribal memory and official story, make it both microcosm and metaphor for a larger postmodern American culture born of fusions and confusions, tensions between and affirmations of cultural identities, all undergirded by fundamental questionings of both culture and identity.

Tales of Burning Love, Erdrich's fifth venture into the myth-history of her region, opens with the same event that opened her first novel, Love Medicine (1984). On Holy Saturday, 1981, June Morrisey, a Chippewa woman who has become something of a prostitute, begins a journey from the oil fields near Williston, N.D., to her actual and spiritual. homeland on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, more than 200 miles to the east.

Her journey is interrupted by an encounter with a man in a bar, a bout of drinking and a botched attempt at sex in the man's truck, following which June climbs out of the truck and attempts to continue on foot her quest for home. In the early hours of Easter morning she is found dead in a freak blizzard. While Love Medicine goes on to explore ways in which June's search for a home is played out by a host of others and ultimately completed by her son who never knew her except in tribal legend, Tales of Burning Love charts the subsequent life and marriages of the man whose sexual failing contributed to June's death.

Jack Mauser, himself a half-Chippewa who has consciously suppressed what the novel calls "the Ojibwa part" of his core identity, finds himself 13 years later haunted by the memory of the woman he failed to save, facing in each of the four women he has since married the ghost of June Morrisey.

Erdrich makes full use of comic novelistic license in recasting the Easter 1981 incident as the foundation for her creation of Jack as a man who, we now discover, tasted true love and actually married June Morrisey during their brief,

alcohol-fueled encounter, and has been seeking to recapture that love in four subsequent marriages, even as he seeks to assuage the guilt he feels for having abandoned June to her death in the snow.

The narrative present finds him the owner of a financially shaky Fargo construction company, recently married to Dot Adare Nanapush, his fifth wife, while still obsessed with thoughts of Eleanor, wife No. 2, herself tom between an obsession with sex and a fascination with the saintly asceticism of a nun whose biography she is writing. This nun is the ancient Sr. Leopolda, parts of whose tormented past are recounted in Love Medicine and in Tracks.

Dot, meanwhile, is still legally married to Gerry Nanapush, the irrepressible Chippewa trickster-hero whose escape from a plane crash en route to a federal prison (recounted in detail in The Bingo Palace) paves the way for a symbolic crossing of the paths of one character who politicizes his Indian identity and another who hides his.

Complicating matters for Jack and the others is the fact that wives three and four, Candice and Marlis are now living together as lovers and parenting partners to Jack's infant son, John, to whom Marlis gave birth just prior to her divorce from Jack.

Erdrich has clearly enjoyed herself in exploiting to the full the comic potential of this multiple-wife plot. Readers as well will relish her depiction of Jack's often absurdly misdirected search for love and forgiveness, compounded as it is of male ego gratification, narcissistic sexual impulse, foggy romanticism, financial greed, lots of alcohol and the occasional urge to do the right thing in spite of himself. In several scenes, the comic potential ripens into pure fun as Jack Mauser becomes a kind of postmodern Tom Jones, his sexual exploits forcing him into situations and guises -- twice he finds himself "cross-dressed" by former wives, once as the Virgin Mary -- that subvert the very sexual prowess that seems to be his primary attraction.