Tracks by Louise Erdrich
Published 1988 · 65,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is Tracks to read?
Tracks scores 44 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Erdrich incorporates Ojibwe language and cultural references alongside plainspoken English. Pauline's chapters use Catholic theological vocabulary. Neither register is especially difficult.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Nanapush's chapters flow with the rhythms of oral storytelling. Pauline's chapters are more fragmented and feverish. Both are accessible but distinctive.
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Grounded in physical survival — hunger, cold, labor, childbirth. The spiritual and political dimensions are rendered through concrete experience.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with historical context about allotment, land fraud, and the material conditions of reservation life. The dual narration requires tracking two versions of events.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Two unreliable narrators tell contradictory versions of the same events. The reader must triangulate the truth from their competing accounts.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Fleur's drownings, the lake spirit Misshepeshu, the trees, the land itself — all carry layered symbolic and spiritual meaning rooted in Ojibwe cosmology.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Nanapush narrates with wry humor and self-awareness. Pauline has no ironic distance from her own fanaticism, which creates dramatic irony for the reader.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- The land is lost despite all efforts to save it. The novel resolves its plot but the resolution is one of dispossession rather than triumph.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Alternating first-person narrators with contrasting perspectives and agendas. Chronological within each strand but the juxtaposition creates productive tension.
How Tracks is regarded
Tracks holds a literary regard score of 76 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.