SOURCE: "Love Medicine: A Female Moby Dick," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXX, No. 4, Summer, 1989, pp. 478-91.

In the following essay, Matchie outlines parallels between Love Medicine and Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

Published in 1984, Love Medicine is about a tribe of Indians living in North Dakota. Its author, Louise Erdrich, is part Chippewa and in the book returns to her prairie roots for her literary materials. Recently, Erdrich published another work entitled Beet Queen, also about the Red River Valley, and some of the same characters appear in both novels. Love Medicine is different from so much of Native American literature in that it is not polemic—there is no ax to grind, no major indictment of white society. It is simply a story about Indian life—its politics, humor, emptiness, and occasional triumphs. If Erdrich has a gift, it is the ability to capture the inner life...