SOURCE: Gleason, William. “‘Her Laugh an Ace’: The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 11, no. 3 (1987): 51-73.

In the following essay, Gleason examines how humor is used as a metaphor and as a tool for emotional growth in Love Medicine.

We have one priceless universal trait, we Americans. That trait is our humor. What a pity it is that it is not more prevalent in our art.

—William Faulkner

Many early reviewers of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine treat the novel as though it were at heart a tragic account of pain. They see Erdrich as merely a recorder of contemporary Indian suffering, as an evoker of her characters' “conflicting feelings of pride and shame, guilt and rage—the disorderly intimacies of their lives on the reservation and their longings to escape.”¹ These critics classify Love Medicine as “a tribal chronicle of...