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In addition to this Summary & Analysis, SparkNotes also offers a separate, comprehensive Study Guide for“The Red Convertible.”

The Red Convertible

Summary: The Red Convertible

This story, told from the first-person point of view of Lyman Lamartine, follows two of Lulu’s boys, brothers Lyman and Henry Junior. Four years prior, in 1970, Lyman and his brother buy a red Oldsmobile convertible together. That summer, they drive the car together, not even paying attention to the details of places they drive through, and they pick up a girl named Susy and offer to take her home. When she tells them that she lives in Alaska, they go there and love it. Lyman and Henry Junior stay in a tent near Susy’s parents’ house until the seasons begin to change. When they return to North Dakota, Henry Junior is drafted into the army, goes to training, and is sent to Vietnam. The family receives only two letters from him before he is captured by the Vietnamese. During the three years he is gone, Lyman fixes the car into “tip-top condition.” 

When Henry Junior returns from the war, he has changed. He is jumpy and unable to sit still, mean and unable to laugh. Once, Henry Junior bites his own lip as he watches TV. Lyman and his mother Lulu agree that sending Henry to a VA hospital would be impossible and wrong, so Lyman devises a plan. He purposely damages the car in many ways. When Henry Junior sees the damaged car, he wants to fix it. Lyman’s plan works. Henry Junior works on the car all winter and by spring, it is repaired, and Henry Junior seems better, calmer, and more like himself. When Henry Junior suggests that he and Lyman take the car for a spin, their only sister Bonita takes a photograph of the two brothers beside the car. The story fast-forwards a bit as Lyman says that the photograph is now in a bag in his closet and haunts him. Lyman has hidden the photo because he doesn’t want to look at Henry Junior’s face.

Back in the main story line, Lyman and Henry Junior decide to drive east to the Red River. The river is swollen with spring melt. They build a fire and Henry Junior gets lost in his own thoughts. He tells Lyman that he knows that Lyman deliberately damaged the car. When Henry Junior insists that Lyman take the car for himself, the two brothers begin to fight, at moments laughing, at others punching and hurting. The brothers drink all the beers in their cooler and begin to sing and dance. Henry Junior jumps into the river and the current pulls him away. His last words are “My boots are filling.” Lyman goes into the river but cannot save Henry Junior. Lyman emerges, puts the car in gear, gets out, and watches the car plow into the river and slowly sink. 

Analysis: The Red Convertible

In some ways, this story is like other stories in Love Medicine, but Erdrich deviates from her usual style in the first paragraph of the story. She telescopes the entire tale in one sentence, mysteriously foreshadowing the ending: “We owned it together until his boots filled with water on a windy night and he bought out my share.” Readers do not yet know that Henry Junior owns the whole car because both he and the car are now part of the river, both dead in the water. 

The car is personified throughout the tale. When Lyman and Henry Junior first see the vehicle in Winnipeg, it is almost as if the car is alive. The car is damaged by Lyman just as Henry Junior is damaged by his captivity during the war. The car is repaired by Henry Junior just as he is slightly mended by repairing it. In the final scene, both Henry Junior and the car drown in the river. They sink slowly, their headlights still shining, but they sink nonetheless. In the end, the car and Henry Junior are one.

This story is directly connected to “The Bridges” because it tells the story of Henry Junior from another perspective. In “The Bridges,” Henry Junior has recently returned home to Fargo from the war. In this story, he returns to his mother’s house where he spends the winter still suffering from PTSD. Although Henry Junior seems to improve as he repairs the convertible, drinking beers brings out the disorder in him and he breaks, just as the car has been broken by Lyman. It is fitting that he dies by drowning because water has been such a strong and powerful metaphor throughout the novel, representing the flow of life, sometimes nourishing and sometimes overpowering, sometimes nurturing and other times destructive.

In classical tragic form, this story moves from a very happy beginning into chaos, madness, and death. In the beginning, the brothers are jovial and carefree, and their trip to Alaska is a high point of their contentment. The paragraphs in which Lyman talks about the photograph hidden in the closet foreshadow the sadness and despair to come. The photos are out of synch in the timeline, which makes them even more haunting. The alcohol-fueled ending may seem abrupt, shocking, and devastating, but it is also inevitable because of the depths of Henry Junior’s suffering. It may be unclear whether he commits suicide or drowns accidentally, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. His experiences destroy him. 

The red convertible pairs with another significant car in the novel, the Malibu that Lipsha will win in a poker game with his half-brother King at the end of the book. It is the car that King buys with their mother’s insurance money and the final symbol of her return home. The red convertible becomes a vehicle of death and a life destroyed. The Malibu, like the dandelions at the end of “Love Medicine,” is a symbol of sustainable life, even after death.

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