SOURCE: Flavin, Louise. “Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: Over Time and Distance.” Critique 31, no. 1 (fall 1989): 55-64.

In the following essay, Flavin asserts that Love Medicine is a novel about “disintegration and breaking connections, and of bonding and restoration.”

Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine appeared in 1984, just fifteen years after the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to N. Scott Momaday for his novel of contemporary Indian American life, House Made of Dawn. Momaday's novel is generally recognized as setting off the renaissance of written imaginative native American works that followed in the next two decades. This span of years saw the publication of works by native Americans D'Arcy McNickle (The Surrounded and Wind from an Enemy Sky), Leslie Silko (Ceremony), and James Welch (Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney), among others.

The sudden appearance of so many novels by native American writers coincides with the social and political...