The novel is comprised of nine chapters alternatively narrated by homodiegetic focalizers: Nanapush and Pauline Puyat. Lulu, who will be one of the elderly in Love Medicine, is very young in Tracks, and she is just learning how to deal with the intruding white society. The events of Tracks take place before that of The Beet Queen and Love Medicine. Tracks, one of Erdrich's masterpieces, narrates the lives of some tribal Chippewa families living on a reservation off and around a lake called Matchemanito, where the Native American communities believe a Lake Monster, called Misshepeshu, lurks. They begin and end with a loss a circular structure indebted to oral narrative tradition. Erdrich's novels usually have a circular design. These tactics persuade the reader to suspect the stability of categories such as time, truth, narration, and reliability (McClinton-Temple and Velie 111). For instance, she lets different narrators act diachronically and synchronically, that is, intermittently different narrators relate the same event. She manipulates traditional narrative conventions. Although her novels are always set against a backdrop of Native American cultural life, they seek to challenge both Native and Western epistemological assumptions (Shackleton 202). Yet Erdrich avoids giving priority to one cultural code over another her literary and cultural hybridization intends to deconstruct binaries like the Europeans versus the Natives.

The historical tragedies of epidemic diseases, wars, and mischievous federal regulations, Erdrich implies, deteriorate traditional tribal bonds among Native Americans, especially the Chippewa. The recurrent themes in her fiction are the 'ties between people and geographical locations, the importance of community among all living beings, the complexities of individual and cultural identity, and the exigencies of marginalization, dispossession, and cultural survival.' Her fiction, moreover, is ripe with 'amily and motherhood, storytelling, healing, environmental issues, and historical consciousness' which connects her work thematically to the expanding web of contemporary Native American literature (Rainwater 271). Thus, Erdrich usually appends a family tree to her novels to refresh the memory of the reader.

Owing to the interconnection between most of Louise Erdrich's novels, the readers are bewildered, especially when they pick up her novels out of sequence or, although readers might have read her earlier works, they scarcely remember who is who in later novels.

Tracks louise