Tracks by Louise Erdrich (review)

66 Western American Literature and ideas which have long been important to his fiction, and virtual signatures for his style. But there is an important difference: Anything for Billy shows a serious maturity, a greater confidence of position, and a deeper relationship of themes and ideas than any previous work; and those who have followed his career from Horseman, Pass By through this newest work will be excited to see a fulfillment of potential that has long been called for. This book takes on many of the preconceptions about the Western novel and exposes them for the manu­ factured shams they are. In sum, by deliberately ignoring facts and figures, McMurtry shows that the most important thing about any story, Western or otherwise, is the story itself. There is realism here, violence as well, but it emerges with a casualness that befits such happenings as they occurred in history; murder and mayhem aren’t sensational until writers make them so. There is also comedy here, but the wild absurdities of Texasville and self-indulgent hyperbole of Cadillac Jack are thankfully absent, as are the sprawling running jokes of Lonesome Dove. Here McMurtry has taken a page from others such as Robert Altman and John Huston, Thomas Berger, Clifford Irving, and even Mark Twain by creating an entertaining novel based less on historical fact or established legend than on the richness of fictional character and fertile imagination of a first class novelist. CLAY REYNOLDS University of North Texas Tracks. By Louise Erdrich. (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1988. 226 pages, $18.95.) Louise Erdrich’s third novel, Tracks, follows in the wake of critical and popular acclaim for Love Medicine and The Beet Queen, works that marvel­ lously spin character out of a prose style at once minimalistic and capable of bruising lyricism. Tracks is essentially a prologue to Love Medicine, filling in part of the untold story of the tribe’s near-extinction through the narration of Nanapush, old storyteller-survivor,who sees and knows the truth at the moment beyond which it can be reversed and who tells the story to his adopted grand­ daughter Lulu, though she is not yet ready to understand. Mirroring his reflecting-pool clarity is Pauline, the hysterical and opportunistic mixed-breed who turns her invisibility and impotence into a psycho-sexual force field, adopt­ ing Catholicism’s paradoxes and privations in order to rationalize and tran­ scend her deceptions and guilt. It is Erdrich’s achievement in this novel that we are snared and led by this twisted psyche; alternately sympathetic and suspicious, we participate and recoil. Through Pauline, whose versions of truth become real in the telling, we experience that suffocating void in the moment before the twister’spath of destruction. Reviews 67 Negative capability is Erdrich’smost remarkable gift. Chapter after chap­ ter in Love Medicine characters surface as complete entities, fully realized, deepening our understanding into compassion and empathy. (Lulu Lamartine is probably the most superb example, seducing us utterly as she has so many of these characters.) Out of this kaleidoscope of character plot is born, almost incidentally. But in Tracks, much of the immediacy is missing: there is the remove of time in Nanapush’sstory;the reader’sincreasing estrangement from Pauline as her madness escalates; and a supra-plot existing outside the novel itself as the forces of government, business and church conspire. The character we want to know most, Fleur Pillager, isnever known directly, but through the understanding eyes of Nanapush and the misunderstandings of Pauline. She remains both the central figure of both narrations and the unknown mystery, intact at the end of the novel—though we’ve seen her wild, domesticated and broken. Forced off her land as the tall oaks come crashing down around her cabin, she smiles her broad wolf grin as if she alone has the last laugh. The chronological progression, the alternating narrations, the inevitable uprooting of Fleur create a novel that’s narrowing, deterministic, a story recounted. This isvery much in opposition to Love Medicine, where space and time are subordinate to the power of character, where Erdrich explodes the potential energy of the inscrutabilities of the human heart. In Tracks...