Tales of Burning Love. Louise Erdrich. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. 448 pages. $25.00 hardcover.

French-German-Chippewa writer Louise Erdrich's novel, Tales of Burning Love, is billed as non-Indian: the book's jacket advertises that "Erdrich moves beyond the world of the reservation to tell the story of five women whose lives are connected by one man." Yet despite this "broader" focus, anyone familiar with Erdrich's earlier work will immediately recognize the characters and locales; like The Beet Queen (1986), Tales of Burning Love takes place in Argus, a small town a few miles down the road from the reservation setting of Erdrich's three other novels, Love Medicine (1984), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994). In fact, Tales' intimate connections to these works necessarily revises our view of them as a quartet: the web of Erdrich's imaginative world spins wider with each novel. Aside from the delight which established Erdrich fans will take in the connections to previous novels (particularly the resolution of some of The Bingo Palace's cliffhangers), Tales of Burning Love stands alone as a rich, daring, complex, satisfying work.

More than any of her other works, this novel centers around a single thematic thread. As its tongue-in-cheek pulp-romance title promises, Tales of Burning Love explores the consuming, unpredictable power of passion, whether religious, erotic, romantic, or parental. Erdrich boldly plays on the conventions of the dime-store thriller, reveling in fantastic coincidence and immoderate emotions; yet somehow in her hands these people and their lives are believable and compelling, if not always likeable. The novel loosely focuses on four women: Eleanor Mauser, a self-absorbed, sensual intellectual fired from her university job for seducing an undergraduate; Candice Pantamounty, a clean-pressed, precise professional dentist; Marlis Cook, a bitter, desperate alcoholic blackjack dealer; and Dot Nanapush, a lonely accountant married to a convicted felon. All of them share ties to the same man, smooth-talking, four-timing, debt-shuffling trickster Jack Mauser.

While such a structure might appear to create a feminist's nightmare (many peripheral women focused on one central man), it actually affords Erdrich some of her most comic feminist statements yet. Over and over, encounters between Jack's former wives relegate him to the sidelines. For instance, just after congratulating himself that two of his wives are weeping over him, Jack realizes suddenly,

   The weeping had fused unseen connections, circuits had clicked into place,
   their stories matched cadence by cadence. He wanted to stop the car, to get
   out and run, to abandon the increasingly forceful complexity beside and
   behind him. There was a science experiment. Lumps of coal. With the right
   mixture of chemicals colored crystals grew on the black surfaces. Blue,
   white, red, they formed link on link into stacks and cones of intricate
   needle-tipped bright shapes. It was happening. By the time they got to
   Mauser's house, he knew that he was in the car with something else, a
   different shape, alien, brilliant, ultra female, something he didn't want
   to look at. He maneuvered the driveway, stopped, carefully got out and
   walked into the new subdivision house. Only when he was safely behind a
   window did he look back.

The novel contains a number of remarkable women, from the formidable Anna Schlick, a trapeze-artist turned society-wife turned radiant, stunning social pariah, to Sister Leopolda, who has made sainthood an exalted form of egotism, to a carved statue of the virgin whose expression reveals "a repressed passion of rage and ardor."

Tales of Burning Love is sure to fuel the debate over an ethnic work's "authenticity." Is this work, or should it be, a Native American novel? Ethnic writers, especially best-selling ones, often carry the burden of representing a whole culture to a larger audience. The reader will not find much Native American subject matter here. While many of the characters are part-Indian, the novel lacks the sense of communal history present in Erdrich's reservation novels, as its connections to the fictional Chippewa community near Argus are muted. Jack Mauser's main tie to his mother's reservation is his secret amusement that no one knows he is Indian.

Yet this work owes much to Native art forms. Among characters alienated from cultural and communal ties, Erdrich raises such aesthetic issues as the vitality of storytelling and the relative power of oral and written forms. When his four ex-wives are stranded in a blizzard together after attending his funeral, Jack becomes the trickster in a cycle of tales they tell in an all-night vigil to stay alive. This highly comic dramatic event gathers layers of meaning from the listeners' seething passions and resentments. Storytelling becomes both form and substance, shaping the novel and the narrators' lives. Erdrich writes,

   The exhaled breath of the women already coated the window in white velvet.
   Each word that Eleanor spoke added to the icy fabric. The image struck her.
   They were, all of them, enclosed in the spoken words, both saved and cut
   off by the narrative trailing into the dark and shaping itself into the
   larger, flatter, patterns of crystal collecting on the glass windows of
   Jack's Explorer.... The ink in her pen was frozen and left no visible mark,
   but in the dark she couldn't tell and so she wrote across the ruled lines,
   jaggedly, in a fit of intensity. If so, to breath upon that window, opening
   a black space, is to erase, to forget some portion of the past ...

Eleanor finds spoken words to be tangible, while her pen (with which she neurotically records her every thought) freezes uselessly when it comes to saving her life.

Erdrich's language is as wide-ranging and flexible as her characters, and expressed with a fresh, observant, poetic eye. When a dying woman gazes at a blue vase, we are treated to a brilliant array of images:

   July blue of glacial slit in a lake reflecting an impassive blaze of sky.
   The leafy blueness of childhood's solitudes. A three a.m. mid-summer blue
   when there's a cool swash of air to drink and the birds fall silent just
   half an hour, that blue hour, before starting to sing again. And the sex
   blue of a man's faded cotton shirt soaking up the darker hay blue of his
   clean sweat.

For anyone familiar with her previous novels, Tales of Burning Love ripples with narrative sleights-of-hand, weaving in loose strands and fleshing out previously peripheral characters' lives from earlier works. Most striking is her reworking of Andy, June Morrisey's last fling before walking into a snowstorm in the opening scene of Love Medicine. The first chapter of Tales retells that fateful encounter from the point of view of Jack Mauser, who has been haunted by June ever since he gave her a fake name and married her at that bar in an alcoholic haze. Erdrich's constantly shifting focus reminds us that everyone (even the white guy) has a story.

Whatever one's expectations of Erdrich as a Native American writer, her artistry dazzles and her stories linger in the mind. True to its mocking, enticing title, Tales of Burning Love is refreshingly irreverent, a great comic foray into our most and least noble impulses. Like the stories the wives vow to tell, this novel scorches paper and heats the air.

Jeanne R. Smith Seton Hall University

Jeanne R. Smith is the author of Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (1997). She's published articles on Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Zitkala-Sa and theories of ethnic literature. She currently teaches American literature at Seton Hall University.

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