We have one priceless universal trait, we Americans. That trait is our humor. What a pity it is that it is not more prevalent in our art. -William Faulkner Many early reviewers of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine treat the novel as though it were at heart a tragic account of pain. They see Erdrich as merely a recorder of contemporary Indian suffering, as an evoker of her characters’ ”conflicting feelings of pride and shame, guilt and rage-the disorderly intimacies of their lives on the reservation and their longings to escape.” These critics classify Love Medicine as “a tribal chronicle of defeat,” a ”unique evocation of a culture in severe social ruin,” and an ”appalling account of . . . impoverished, feckless lives far gone in alcoholism and promiscuity.” Each of these descriptions betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the novel; any reckoning of Love Medicine as an ultimately tragic text begs contradiction. To be sure, the book contains much that is painful. Its undying vision, however, is one of redemption-accomplished through an expert and caring use of humor. Erdrich’s characters by novel’s end are not far gone, but close to home; she evokes a culture not in severe ruin, but about to rise; she chronicles not defeat, but survival. Love, assisted by humor, triumphs over pain.

This excerpt from William A. Gleason’s Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature juxtaposes the work of Richard Harding Davis and Olga Beatriz Torres, two international travelers during the generation preceding US involvement in World War I. Davis, a popular author and magazine editor, barnstormed through Central and South America, which he made the subject of a popular travelogue and “imperialist novel.” Torres, a teenaged girl, traveled north from Mexico into the United States and reported on conditions there in a series of letters published after her death. Yet despite their obvious disparities in point of view, the two works not only address similar themes of US power (albeit from different directions) but they both focus on architecture and how it reflects race and class structures. The excerpt forms a fascinating counterpoint to Rhys Isaac’s pioneering study of architecture and social hierarchy in colonial Virginia, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1983).