Tales of Burning Love by Louise Erdrich (review)

90 Western American Literature years have washed the passion and intimacy away ... or have they? It’s hard to guess what might happen. Since Levi Peterson doesn’t create main characters who can ignore their moral consciousness, the only question that remains is “How will each of the characters face the past and continue to live in the present?” Peterson’s characters answer this question in honest, thought-provoking ways. When Durfey rejoins his family in Cedar City (where they are attend­ ing the annual Shakespeare festival) he sums up his class-reunion experi­ ence by saying, “I’ve been surveying the earth from the perspective of the Class of ’51. . . . It’s a strange angle to see things from.” It may seem strange to Durfey, but for Levi Peterson’s readers it will seem oddly familiar. JANE REILLY Utah State University Tales of Burning Love. By Louise Erdrich. (New York: HarperCollins, 1996. 452 pages, $25.00.) It’s a gutsy move to name a book Tales ofBurning Love. The title sug­ gests a torrid read, full of incendiary passion. And that’sjust what we get in Louise Erdrich’s new novel, which more than lives up to its inflamma­ tory moniker. Houses burn down, passions heat up, and religious zealots spontaneously combust during the course of this rollicking story of jeal­ ousy and desire and love. The fifth volume in her series of interconnected novels, Burning Love is the story of five women who love one man, a ne’r-do-well, mixed-blood mountain of a man named Jack Mauser. The richly inventive plot twists and turns with all the subtle (and not so subtle) subterfuges of passionate attachment and its flip side, passionate rage. In fact, if Burning Love has a weakness, it is too many plot turns, too much inventiveness. In a recent interview with the Minnesota Daily, Erdrich states: “I think I’m more of a plot person than a lot of writers. I like manufacturing and manipulating and figuring out plots.” On occasion, the plot machin­ ery that built this book grinds its gears, causing the reader—who would rather believe in the characters than admire the author’s cleverness—to feel a bit manipulated. For example, one senses that Erdrich positions Eleanor, a libidinous English professor once married to Jack Mauser, in Sister Leopolda’s convent more from the need to build connections to her Reviews 91 previous four books than as an authentic expression of Eleanor’s charac­ ter. But if inventiveness is at times a weakness, it’s also one of the book’s chief delights. Tales of Burning Love is as trashy as a beach book, as improbable as a sci-fi story, as unpredictable as a murder mystery, and as (if not more) insightful about love as many a book that takes the subject more seriously. Assured of a firm place in American letters, Erdrich is not afraid to flout the conventions of so-called “serious” works of literature by flirting with popular genres. In short, she is not afraid to entertain. I predict you won’t be able to put down this book until you’ve read the last scorching page. ELIZABETH BLAIR Southwest State University The Macken Charm. By Jack Hodgins. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995. 294 pages, $18.99 [Canadian].) In The Macken Charm, events from a twenty-four-hour period—a funeral during the day, followed by a wake that night—are spun into a rol­ licking novel by the tried-and-true narrative device of beginning the story near the end and then going back and filling in. The adolescent narrator, Rusty, tells us just enough about his parents and their generation, and about Glory, his deceased aunt, to allow us to make sense of the funeral and wake. It is the considerable temporal span between the narrated events and the storytelling event that merits close attention: The Island Highway was still a strip of pleasant tarmac in the year of Glory’s funeral—1956. A whole half hour might pass between cars. More than three hours of driving and two hours of steamship away, Vancouver could have been in a foreign country. You expected...