Love Medicine: Full Book Analysis

Each story in Love Medicine is told in a unique voice that echoes the rich oral tradition of the Chippewa, in particular, and Native Americans, in general. One can hear the poet in Lipsha’s telling, the child in Henry Junior’s, and the activist in Lulu’s. This multivocal quality lets the narrative sing, like the wild, unholy songs that Eli sings to attract both deer and women. It also allows readers to experience an event told by different voices, such as Marie and Nector in “Saint Marie” and “Wild Geese,” two stories that happen on the same day.

A complex and non-traditional novel, Love Medicine does not have one clear protagonist, but the two mother figures, Marie Kashpaw and Lulu Lamartine, share the role. As representatives of both Mother Earth and the twentieth-century Native American woman, they succumb to their families and fates from youth to old age, where they eventually make their peace and become friends. This cannot happen until Nector Kashpaw is dead and his spirit released. In this sense, Nector is the novel’s antagonist. He is schooled in government schools, works mostly for white businesses, and becomes a tribal leader who sometimes sells out to the demands and whims of the United States government. He is unfaithful to both Marie and Lulu, loving them both in different ways and unable to choose between them, even in the dementia of his old age. Unlike Lipsha, he is not grounded in the old indigenous ways. Unlike Gerry, he is stuck in the prison of his own selfish heart. Unlike Eli, he is not a man of the woods and the wild. Despite his physical demise, Nector’s death is accidental and sudden, but it releases the two protagonists to become more fully themselves.

The event that sets this triangular conflict into motion happens in 1934, when Marie flees Sacred Heart convent after being attacked by Sister Leopolda and literally runs into Nector. Nector has already confessed his lust for Lulu, a girl he does not love but still wants. He is saving money to buy Lulu a wedding band, which makes him stop Marie because he sees her as a source of a possible reward from the nuns. Nector gets more than he bargained for in his encounter with Marie. By the end of the story, he holds her wounded hand in his, offers her the geese he has shot, and admits that he both wants her and does not want her but cannot let her go.

This love triangle plays out throughout the stories, but it meanders rather than runs in a straight course. Like the waters that flow through the settings, the rising action of the novel twists and turns, sometimes rushes, and sometimes gathers in muddy sloughs. Sometimes, the three characters of Nector, Marie, and Lulu come face-to-face in conflict, such as in “The Plunge of the Brave,” when Nector leaves Marie at home to seek Lulu. The two letters he writes make the conflict visual and visceral. Mostly, the conflict is just below the obvious surface of the plot. The town gossips who visit Marie in “The Beads” question Marie’s fidelity to Nector because they observe Eli around so much, but she remains faithful. Lulu rejects Nector after he tried to throw her off her land. She agrees to marry Bev Lamartine which raises Nector’s jealousy and ire. There are other times when the conflict seethes and bubbles, hardly visible to anyone but the three of them. From the first story to the last, this tension is always there.

The climax happens when Lipsha helps Marie make a love medicine with the intention of luring Nector away from Lulu and back to his rightful wife. Lipsha is very successful at such magic, and so it seems that it will work, but he takes a shortcut when he fails to shoot the geese, and the plan falls apart. Nector, the man who raised Lipsha as a son, chokes on the artificial love medicine instead, and the plot takes a tragic turn. However, although both women mourn his death, Marie and Lulu can each now release the terrible hold that he has had on their hearts. Their love for him and for all their many children has been mostly pure and righteous, and they are rewarded in their old age with a friendship born of that love. When Marie wipes Lulu’s eyes with a warm cloth, it is both benediction and baptism, a sacred act of feminine healing.

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