[1] Erdrich employs a non-linear format in Love Medicine, and each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, using first-person and third-person limited narration.

[3] A pair of stories at the midpoint of the novel converge on a single day in the lives of Lulu Lamartine, Marie Lazarre, and Nector Kashpaw, who are involved in a love triangle.

[3] Family Tree[3] Legend[3] The diversity of critical and theoretical approaches to Love Medicine reflects the book's complexity as a meeting site for multiple forms and conventions.

[8] For example, Uncle Eli, with his deep connections to the land, is described as being healthy and robust in his old age, unlike his senile brother Nector, who grew up off-reservation.

In it, Erdrich articulates a traditional tribal view of place, where generations of families inhabit the same land, and in doing so, imbue the landscape with history, identity, myth and reality.

[8] She explains how American Indian writers write from a different position: for them, "the unthinkable has already happened,"[8] and as such, their task is to reconstitute a new birthing place that is capable of "[telling] the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe.

[2] Gleason's examples of out-of-place humor include Nector's tragicomic death and Gordie's telling of the Norwegian joke in "The World's Greatest Fisherman," as King is heard physically threatening his spouse outside.

[2] He identifies Heyoka, a literally and metaphorically backwards facing contrarian jester, and Nanabhozo, a wisecracking trickster, as two incarnations of pan-Indian characters that thrive on jokes.

[2] Various characters selectively exhibit different aspects of Heyoka and Nanabhozo in the novel: Lipsha complains of his head being "screwed on backwards,"[11] in response to a startling revelation from his grandmother, while Marie employs trickery and dark, aggressive wit to survive in the convent.

[12] While homecoming is a common theme in Native American literatures, Silberman notes that the way Love Medicine engages with the subject evades easy classification, since home represents freedom for some, but entrapment for others.

[12] In his essay, Greg Sarris superimposes such ambiguity and anxiety surrounding homecoming onto moments of his own personal life to explore a possible reading of text that transcends Native borders.

[14][15][5][16] Kathleen Sands describes Love Medicine as a metafictional novel that consists of "hard edges, multiple voices, disjointed episodes, erratic tone shifts […] incomplete memories" that are spliced together in a self-reflexive manner.

Consequently, Wong arrives at a description of Love Medicine as a "web" of short stories that is "informed by both modernist literary strategies (for instance, multiple narrative voices) and oral traditions(such as a storyteller's use or repetition, recurrent development, and associational structure).

"[15] Hertha D. Sweet Wong points to Erdrich's simulation of Indigenous oral forms in her short story "webs" as a key narrative innovation.

"[17] On a contrasting note, citing a bias towards culturalism in the textual critiques of Hertha Sweet Wong and Paula Gunn Allen, Ojibwe writer and literary critic David Treuer cautions against imposing unqualified notions of Native American "polyvocality" and narrative egalitarianism on the text of Love Medicine.

[5] Treuer argues that the what readers experience as "polyvocality" is actually a proliferation of personal symbols, and that on the level of language, all the narrators of Love Medicine, in fact, inhabit the same consciousness.

[5] For Helen Jaskoski, the "Saint Marie" chapter is notable for its reflexive use of Ojibwe Windigo stories to subvert a complex of European romance and fairytale allusions.

[12] James Ruppert and Catherine Rainwater argue that Native forms and Western Literary conventions bring with them opposing codes that make two entirely different interpretations of the same text possible.

"[7] Regardless of differences in critical and theoretical approaches, many scholars such as Wong, Ownes, and Rainwater agree that there exists an underlying structure that link Love Medicine's stories together.

[15] Hertha D. Sweet Wong points out the loosely chiasmic structure of Love Medicine, where symmetrically positioned chapters mirror each other on subject matter.