Erdrich borrows forms from a number of writers. The comic romance, with its series of problems that are resolved and its marriage or marriages, can be seen in Shakespeare's comedies as well as Henry Fielding and Jane Austen. In Tales of Burning Love the marriages of Jack are among the main problems in the novel; one of his wives, Eleanor, is part of the solution, with a relationship to him like but not equal to a marriage.

William Faulkner's many novels and stories dealing with several centuries of his mythic Yoknapatawpha country serve as a model for what Erdrich has been doing in the series of books of which Tales of Burning Love is a part. Just as Faulkner's Hamlet (1940),The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959) successively deal with different periods in the development of the Snopes's family, so do Erdrich's novels have their history. Tracks, chronologically...