Louise Erdrich has fashioned a place for herself among America's elbowing fictionists. She has done this mostly in an unassuming way, by trusting to the strength of narrative to convey the essence of her characters, by loving those characters more than herself, and by leaning her work on the work of others. This is another way of saying she has chosen to rest on tradition, with its roots in realism, and to build on that rather than subvert her narratives with the metaphysics of metafictionists.

For a dozen years she has persevered in the quiet satisfactions of story, while the postmodernists, for the most part, have vanished. Those academics who bet their positions on postmodernism, on a Barthian or Cooverian variant of story, must now look for a new meal ticket. The self-conscious forms and practices of postmodernism now seem as dated as the work of the worst cubists, and senseless. Story, the bearer of good news and substance since the first books of the Bible, with its roots in oral tradition, has been redeemed, or has redeemed itself, by proving to be the only enduring means of communication between human beings. It is the form of the story itself, the narrative that unfurls from here to there, that has proved more durable, after all, than even the medium of language. Story has preserved its practitioners.

Erdrich herself has suffered the temptations of postmodernism, to judge from her work. All her novels are characterized by shifting points of view, with a variety of narrators taking up interrelated chapters or stories within each book. And she began as a poet, with a focused yet fractured lyricism that appears through her first collection, Jacklight (1982). Poets born to the task, such as Shelley and Rilke and Roethke and Thomas, compose in binges, it seems, with alternating binges of another sort, often destructive, and only those born to the task can bear the state of molten emotion that poetry demands. Several years after her poems began showing up in quarterlies, and two years after Jacklight, Erdrich's first prose work, Love Medicine, was published by Holt.

It stirred up uncommon attention for a first novel, even before publication, beginning with the Nelson Algren Short Fiction Award for its first chapter, "The World's Greatest Fishermen." It was lauded by writers such as Toni Morrison and Philip Roth and went on to receive the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award. Of Erdrich's four novels since, two have been bestsellers, The Beet Queen (1986) and Tracks (1988), not to mention the curious collaboration with her husband, Michael Dorris (author of The Broken Cord, about an adopted son with fetal alcohol syndrome), that resulted in one of my favorite recent novels, The Crown of Columbus (1991).

Erdrich has been assailed both by feminists and spokespersons for Native Americans. I say spokespersons (with a shudder at the mouthfuls inclusiveness imposes) because some spokespeople for Native Americans are not Native American themselves but seem to assume they understand matters better than those they are speaking for-and it's spokes-persons from whom you can expect newspeak. It was, in fact, such spokespersons who decided Indians should be called Native Americans to begin with, without consulting them. Most American Indians prefer to be called Indian; they like the designation, the term, the name, which is how they refer to themselves generically, when not speaking of a specific band or tribe or nation.

Erdrich descends from Chippewa and German-American stock, and grew up in what many see as the black hole of earth: North Dakota. ("North Dakota?" the caption to a recent cartoon went, of a balding man with a bottle of Scotch nearby speaking to his wife, who has a book open before her. "The book's set in North Dakota? My God. It can't be up to much.") Both sides of her heritage,

the lines of her inheritance, have fallen to her in beautiful places. She has helped put the inhabitants of North Dakota on the literary map. The topography of the Red River Valley and the high plains country of North Dakota, farther west, are central to her identity. Elements of a Roman Catholic upbringing and outlook twine like morning glory through the multilayered strata of that identity. Each character in all her novels is a part of it.

All these elements are handled head-on in the new book, Tales of Burning Love, where Erdrich at times seems to limber up the lumbering artillery. It is her biggest book by bulk alone, tipping in at over 450 pages, and its first chapter replays, surprisingly, the first chapter of Love Medicine. This replaying, though, takes a different point of view.

The first version, stripped of sentimentality, follows June Kashpaw, an Indian woman picked up by an oil-rig worker in the (appropriately) Rigger Bar in Williston, on Easter Saturday, 1981. June's marginal existence, supported by men, is shredding so wholly that she has decided to take a bus back to the reservation (the knob that locks the door to her rented room in her purse) when Andy signals her into the Rigger, and after a day of bar-hopping, drives her into the countryside in his pickup to seduce her.

She falls out the door, recovers herself in the snow, and starts walking the road back to Williston, then decides to strike out overland for the reservation. That night one of the worst spring snows in North Dakota history strikes. In her mind, June makes it home, but in reality, she is found dead. The brief story has an epic or mythic quality, as if it were a cautionary tale told by a family over the years to its daughters.

In the version that opens Tales of Burning Love, the man Andy, we learn, is actually Jack Mauser, whose viewpoint we inhabit. Andy is a name he invents on the spot, and his view of the day, until its end, is more freewheeling and sanguine. Mauser is part Indian, and he and June are married in an impromptu ceremony in a bar, using pop-top rings as wedding bands. Mauser doesn't pass out in his pickup at the crucial point, as his original appears to, but is rendered immobile by his impotence. He considers following June but finally doesn't.

It's tricky to tamper with myth. I, a follower of Erdrich, found myself so bothered by the disparity between versions I began checking them against each other. So will I now become yet another voice against her work? No, but I've learned that in making new for the reader a scene established by publication (and republication: Erdrich did a "New and Expanded Version" of Love Medicine in 1993), you can't render the existing scene too much newer, or the reader will resist it. And this recasting of an Erdrich classic is the opening chapter of Tales of Burning Love.

After that bumpy start, and a brief glimpse of Mauser in the present, the story settles into the solid character of Dot Adare. She has just become Jack's fifth wife, counting June. Dot worked for a road-building crew, in a weighing trailer, along with Albertine Johnson, in Love Medicine. Her first husband, Gerry Nanapush, is in jail still, or again, and she marries Jack at least partly out of sympathy for his financial fix, without letting Gerry know. Jack is now the owner of a heavy-machinery construction firm that generally builds roads, although Jack's dream is to raise a subdivision called simply "The Crest," which he has already invested too much money in.

Gerry will weave a minor thread as the story gathers momentum near its end, chiefly to reveal another generation in Erdrich's ongoing story-Gerry's daughter, Shawn. The center of the book is Jack Mauser, of Mauser and Mauser (he merely repeated his name), the construction firm. He is the book's center of gravity, but the greatest portion of its story, about him and his effect on women, is borne by his four living wives, who become stranded in a blizzard, riding together after Jack's wake. But Jack is not dead.

Many readers will suspect he is the hitchhiker who falls asleep in the rear of the stranded Explorer as the wives recount their stories of Jack, and they have a surprise in store. In fact, a few early readers and reviewers seem to find some of the circumstances of the novel (if my radar is working) overstrained, even unbelievable. They are surely missing the novel's comedy, then, if not its central point, evident in all of Erdrich's work but present with a vengeance in this novel: the coexistence of a supernatural otherworld with the everyday one we all take for granted.

Though there is a semblance to Balzac in Erdrich's interrelated novels and her rawness of outlook, she is not a practitioner of Balzac's naturalism. Her world has spiritual dimensions, and the contours she gives that world, particularly in this novel, largely fall within Christian tradition-or its tradition as interpreted by Rome. The link to that world is Eleanor, Mauser's first real wife, through whom he begins to understand that "he couldn't hold on to a woman ever since he let the first one walk from his arms into Easter snow."

Eleanor is a writer of sorts, or anyway a teacher of writing based in Minneapolis at the novel's opening-one of those romantic and dramatic souls drawn by the "primitive" nature of religion, interested in monasteries and convents, the trappings of spirituality, who imagines encountering a guide or guru able to open that world to her.

And so she is drawn to Sister Leopolda, now 108, resident of the convent of Our Lady of Wheat, near Argus, North Dakota. Jack Mauser's company is building a stretch of Interstate past the convent. Though Eleanor makes copious notes to herself ("Actual effect of prayer on material objects-test! Freudian analysis of reception in convent of bushels of pickling cucumbers") she makes little connection between where she is and why she's there.

She has been fired from her position for seducing a young male undergraduate, a student from one of her writing classes (a journal-writing class, I believe; these details are wonderful) and is out to find a new source of income. She meets Mauser at midnight on the convent grounds, near a pedestal where a new statue of Mary is to be installed. The statue, finally swinging in on chains near the end of the novel, proves to be Mauser's undoing, at least in one sense, and the weight of it spins above Eleanor and Jack throughout the book, via Leopolda. The aged nun dies that night under circumstances no respecter of story would reveal.

Between then and the appearance of the weighty statue from Italy, story runs pure. The intertwined nature of the lives of Mauser's wives is carefully revealed, before they even begin their stories about him. These are the tales of burning love, with their suggestion of Boccaccio. But on the night Leopolda dies, when Eleanor suggests they do a book together, the nun says, " 'What do I have to tell? What do I know?' 'The truth of sacred bonds,' Eleanor made the mistake of answering too piously. 'You have lived a life of sacrifice and love.' "

" 'Love?' Leopolda replies, working up a rage. 'Then ask me what love brings? Can't you see? No relief to love, no end, no wave, no fall, only a continual ascension!' " And finally, as the elderly nun gets more worked up, she cries, " 'My prayer is a tale of burning love, child, but you aren't ready to hear it.' "

So, early in the novel, another burning love appears, and it is upon that love, of supernatural boundlessness, that Tales of Burning Love comes to rest. Each of its characters attempts to embody versions of that love, in imperfect and often comical ways, but it is Mauser and Eleanor who finally attain to it at the novel's end. A character says that Jack and Eleanor deserve one another, but it's more than that. Eleanor, purged of her vacuity and dramatics, is able to receive Jack, for all his frailties, and free him to mourn for the woman he let walk to her death in Easter snow. The end is terribly moving, striking an arc like a rainbow all the way back to the early scene on the convent grounds, making us believe a burning love broods over the shabbiest of our misdeeds.

Along the way you encounter passages pouring with Erdrich's lyric power. Once, as Mauser falls asleep, his full-blood Indian mother appears, "filling up the wide screen of his consciousness," and her look is Leopolda's:

He was food to her; he sustained her, lovingly, with his presence. She craved him. She loved him with the secret, wild, despairing love that mothers bear their boy children, and ardor bound up in loss and foreignness and fury. She adored him and could erase him. Just at the instant he entirely surrendered to sleep he saw her once again, swooping down. … She was the shadow of a bending tree that springs up, snaps toward heaven, and you in the branches, curled against the live heart, shouting!

The tenuous point of view, apparent here, sometimes weakens the book's directness. A similar plaint, though reversed, rises more firmly from Lu lu in Love Medicine: "I want to grind men's bones and drink them in my night tea.

I want to enter them the way their hot shadows fold into their bodies in full sunlight. I want to be their food, their harmful drink, to taste men like stilled jam at the back of my tongue."

Love of this enveloping nature rises from all of Jack's wives, including the middle ones, Candice Pantamounty, D. D. S., and the Polish beauty Marlis Cook. These two, bracketed by the other wives, eventually turn to each other; Marlis, the youngest, briefest, and perhaps most troubled of Jack's wives, bears him his only child, a son, and after Candice offers to help raise him they realize "they had crossed and were held within that electrical field-a strip of bronze grass-that exists between the bodies of women." Marlis's last encounter with Jack, however, suggests a superficiality to her love for Candice, and perhaps a sticker on the dust jacket should read: Prudes and Victorians Keep Out.

As the story moves on, each chapter wisely interleaved to add to the building momentum, one becomes more aware of blemishes on the surface. Every writer occasionally nods at the switch, especially in a book of this length, and that's what editors are for; writers are usually grateful for every one of them. There is a technical side to book production, however, that makes me wonder whether anybody in New York, any proofreader or fact-checker-indeed, any editor presently working there-has any knowledge of the world and the way it works. Typos are not so distracting in this book, though present. But bony is spelled boney, and swathe, meaning to wrap, is used when swath is what is wanted, since a bulldozer is cutting a swath. The curious rural locution, unthawed, is used as it is in the Dakotas, meaning to thaw out, when something unthawed is the opposite: frozen. Candice, who would have had the funny error corrected in one of the many science classes she took toward her D.D.S., commits the gaffe. And then Mauser, standing outside a car, puts down a pistol he's holding-"thumped it on the hood of my car, just over my head," as the narrator, Candice, puts it, when I believe she means roof.

These are minor, but they accumulate. And the premise for keeping the tailpipe free of snow when the Explorer gets stuck and the women must sit out the blizzard, a central premise since Eleanor is blown away carrying out the duty, is that carbon monoxide will build up inside the vehicle. Not unless the fairly new Explorer has a corroded muffler or tailpipe in combination with ratty floorboards; carbon monoxide can't escape from an engine. What happens then, if a tailpipe becomes clogged, is another serious matter; the engine conks out. The women would have frozen to death.

I mention these matters (and these aren't nearly all) with reluctance, not wanting to turn any reader aside from Tales of Burning Love, but to illustrate the decline in American publishing. Publishing is meant to aid and promote the writer, and it seems emblematic that not one copy editor, proofreader, or even senior staff editor at the grand house of HarperCollins caught these errors.

The way publishers now view their responsibilities toward writers, it seems, is by promoting them as celebrities; or, as somebody in the business recently put it, "Publishing is becoming the minor leagues of the entertainment industry." When that is the outlook, rather than the fine points of a good story well told, then a writer of Erdrich's stature has not been well served.

And that's too bad. In The Crown of Columbus (where Erdrich amusingly describes herself, through the person of Vivian Twostar, as "a sort of backyard-barbecue Colette"), Erdrich brings her searing yet healing love for men to rest on a stiff-necked academic, Roger Williams, as in this novel it encompasses a scoundrel of sorts, Jack Mauser. She has matured, and with the maturity her central strength stands clear. More than most contemporaries, more than anyone of her generation I can think of, she lavishes on her characters, and thus on her readers, a love they do not deserve. Her stories of men and women, fractured and at odds with one another-due to misplaced aspirations or the dictates of the culture-always suggest, and especially here, a fiery love that heals. Tales of Burning Love is her best book (discounting The Crown of Columbus, not wholly hers) since the brilliant Love Medicine.

Tales of Burning Love

By Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins

452 pp.; $25

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 6

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